Tip of the Sphere: First Thoughts on Opening Night

The MSG Sphere opened with U2 on Friday, and honestly, it looks absolutely, mind -blowingly bananas . With bleeding-edge audio and the largest, highest-resolution LED screen in the world, The Sphere will change all of our perspectives on the role of a venue in live performance. You can’t click around and watch videos from U2’s opening night and tell me that that’s empty hype. When Bono told Zane Lowe the other day that “this was about trying to make the worst seat in the house into the bast seat in the house,” he really wasn’t kidding. Secondary markets are supporting this, to some extent — the “bad” seats right now are going for $600+I am borrowing this image from Rolling Stone on Stubhub. ?

You can read up on the business of the Sphere in Billboard . The venue was insanely expensive — $2.3 billion price tag, nearly double the $1.2 billion initially estimated when the project was announced in 2018. But it’s interesting to think about all the ways that the venue can monetize, beyond the traditional residency or one-band-at-a-time approach of traditional venues. Case in point, The Sphere will be doing four-a-day screenings of Darren Aronofksy’s nature film Postcards from Earth on days that U2 doesn’t play. That’s 20k seats four times a day for $49 a pop for the cheap seats. $4 million gross a day or more, if the appetite is there. Those are dollars that standard venues have no option to earn.?

Two last thoughts: One, kudos to MSG for making sure a bunch of influencers were invited to opening night. That’s how I first saw inside the Sphere, and if all of these videos were intended to create FOMO, well, mission very much accomplished. I absolutely hate Vegas, and I’m thinking now about how to get there. And two: I can’t help but to let my mind wander to what will be next? The Sphere feels like the coolest place in the world to see a concert now, and a clear evolution, if not an outright revolution, in how to think about a venue. Who will build on this new standard, and what tech will be brought to bear? The future of live feels exciting to me in a way that it didn’t 24-hours ago.?