When Sphere opened in 2023 on the Las Vegas Strip, it was unlike anything built before it. It’s 366 feet tall by 516 feet wide — the world’s largest spherical structure — and is covered in a 160,000 square foot curved LED screen. To show visuals inside its dome, the images must be captured in a 16K resolution — four times the common resolution for digital cinematography, and to project sound, the venue uses cutting edge technology that can laser point hi-definition audio at every seat in its 20,000 capacity house.
According to Josephine Vaccarello, head of booking for MSG Entertainment and Sphere, that’s why picking the right band to open it up was paramount. They selected U2, an act she says “has always pushed the boundaries” with their live set. Since then, the venue has hosted a number of residencies, including Dead & Co, Anyma, Backstreet Boys, Kenny Chesney, Phish and more — all of which Vaccarello and Carolyn Blackwood, head of Sphere Studios, who leads the visuals and immersive content for the venue, say “come with their own set of challenges.”
To understand how a Sphere residency goes from the moment of booking to opening night, Blackwood and Vaccarello did an interview backstage at the Vegas venue for the inaugural episode of Billboard’s new music business podcast On the Record With Kristin Robinson.
Below are edited excerpts from the On the Record interview, which can be watched in full here.
How do the visuals work at Sphere for an artist like Dead & Company, given they’re known for ad libbing during their sets. How do you fine tune a visual to sync up with that?
Blackwood: They’re probably one of the most interesting groups we’ve worked with… Some other shows tend to be more baked, but [the Dead] change their playlist every night. They’ve created a digital library of visuals they use and tools they use so that they can play around with the visuals in real time as they jam.
How many shows does it typically take to break even and then start bringing a profit on these shows?
Vaccarello: I don’t know that there’s a finite number, but I think that 12 is in the right spot.
How do you handle booking for an artist like Backstreet Boys, who did a run of shows this summer, but are now coming back for two additional legs of their residency in the coming months, do you reserve those spots in advance for them?
Vaccarello: It’s exactly that. Honestly, dealing with the calendar here is unlike other buildings where you come in and pop in an act for a few days here or there — it’s really Tetris because you don’t know what the [success] will be like until the show starts…. And we’re a building that runs 365 days a year. We don’t have dark days, so we have experiences on the same day as concerts. We will do two experiences in the morning and then flip the house over and do a concert that night.
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Do you have any software or tools that help you predict how many nights someone could sell out?
Vaccarello: There’s a lot of data we can use to figure this out — how many tickets they’ve sold, what their touring history is, all that, but what they would do on tour and then what they could do in Sphere is different. Sphere has its own oomph to it. It changes what maybe would normally happen on tour.
How do you plan to use generative AI at Sphere? Are there any tools on the horizon that you’re excited to play around with?
Blackwood: 100%. We just had a meeting about this last week. We’re very interested in the whole idea behind audio reactive content for the screen, using gen AI to help us develop tools where sound creates visuals… The idea of being able to create an entire show and program that way is something we’re working on.
