The crowd in Times Square at 5 p.m. on Thursday (June 3) appeared normal. Tourists posed with giant Labubus and Transformers, and those pushing past to get from A to B faced no more difficulty than usual. But at 6:27 p.m., two secret doors inside a billboard three stories above Broadway opened up and the Queen of Pop emerged. For the next 15 minutes, Madonna took to the small stage overlooking the street to perform her two new singles from her new album Confessions II, as well as favorites from Confessions, as thousands of adoring fans looked on from the street below.
Behind the scenes, the moment took years of careful planning. Madonna’s performance, which captured attention globally and served as a marketing ploy in partnership with Grindr to celebrate Pride Month and help support her current album campaign for Confessions II, was tied to the official launch of new venue The Square. And its location, directly on Broadway and 47th Street in the heart of Times Square, makes it one of the more sensational, and secretive, venues in the city.
“We thought she was the right person to talk across multiple generations of fans,” says Jeff Marks, CEO of Innovative Partnerships Group, which was involved in the venue’s creation. “You don’t get someone better than her who can talk to anyone in the world.”
Built beneath the Hilton Tempo Hotel, The Square features 10 floors of spaces designed for brand experiences and live performances. The venue, where brands can bring in artists to perform on stage — both inside the building and on the small stage semi-hidden within the billboard overlooking the street — and blast videos to its digital billboard, is the result of a multi-billion-dollar investment. (Innovative Partnerships Group did not provide an exact figure.)
“It was built for curators, content creators, influencers to create cultural moments,” Marks says. “The Square was built for a digital world.”
While the Madonna show marked the venue’s official opening, The Square isn’t necessarily new. Charli xcx famously performed at the venue for an H&M partnership during her brat era, and Shakira and Post Malone have also utilized the stage to help promote albums in the last few years.
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“When an artist wants to do their album drop, they play here because you come on stage and it becomes global overnight,” Marks says. “And what we’ve been told by each artist that tested The Square to date is that, when they did their next album drop, it was the most successful launch of all their albums.”
According to Marks, each of the previous editions of The Square shows were test runs for the venue’s viability. With Madonna, The Square is now open in its entirety, including the second-floor broadcast studio, the Palace Theater — which was hydraulically moved up to the third and fourth floors on the back half of the property — and an events space on the ninth floor. Artists performing at The Square don’t even have to leave the premises throughout their stay in New York City; they can go straight from their room at the Hilton Tempo Hotel to the stage on Times Square.
While there’s only a 15-minute window for performers to take the stage — due to restrictions put in place by the city for open-air pop-up events of that scale — the space can hold a smaller group of fans inside and can close, with the concert completed behind the screen. Fans passing by Times Square who want to hear the rest of the concert happening inside can scan a QR code and stream the audio from their personal listening devices. The QR code serves a dual purpose, allowing brands to know who’s engaging with their content. To comply with city permits, shows can’t be announced until 30 minutes in advance to prevent too large a crowd from forming.
“Every single time, it fills up and goes all the way down to 42nd or 43rd [Streets],” Marks says. “It feels like millions and millions of people, and you can’t move. Three hours ago, no one knew this was going to happen.”
Inside, The Square features technology allowing artists to broadcast on the venue’s digital billboard by tapping their phones and communicating to the masses in Times Square in real-time.
“It’s a safe place for artists to stay here and live in residency,” Marks says. “Your private backstage elevator drops you off at each floor. You can still communicate, because you’re interacting with your fans on the screen. You can [also] pop out and look down on them, but you’re in a safe environment.”
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Within the space are various greenrooms and places for brand activations or interviews. The shows themselves aren’t ticketed and are meant to create a moment — easy to do in Times Square, which regularly sees foot traffic of 200,000 to 250,000 people per day, according to the Times Square Alliance. Beyond that, the venue is also designed to create a moment across social media.
“The smart brands are the ones not asking how many people were there, but how many people will see this,” Marks explains. While performances are only 15 minutes long, they still allow for consumable events that can trend on every social media platform.
“The Square is a music venue, but it’s really for brands and advertisers to have a place to showcase a new product or service,” Marks says. “You could do a concert; you could bring your products on stage. [A company] can get all of their store vendors to be part of it as well. So, all of a sudden, you’re getting a $1 billion showroom, and you can choose your most critical days to do it.”
In addition to the mainstage out in Times Square, more intimate spaces for VIP performances are located indoors, which aren’t beholden to the 15-minute time limit.
Outside of concerts created as part of a brand activation, The Square will generate revenue via product launches, event rentals, film/TV shoots and pop-up retail. Those wanting to utilize the venue are provided with several options at different price points competitive with other venues in the area. They can host smaller private events hosted on the ninth-floor outdoor terrace or 10th floor interior space. Medium-sized events — such as pop-up retail and brand experiences on the venue’s ground floor, broadcast and content studio rentals on the second floor with Times Square as a live backdrop for private concerts, and speaking engagements or industry events on the third and fourth floors — come with some fees. Higher fees are in place for larger-scale events, like the Madonna concert that takes place on the third-floor stage (which requires advance permitting to manage the crowds and traffic), and extra-large events, where brands are able to take over every screen in Times Square.
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The goal for The Square is to host 10 to 12 large events each year, where an artist can come in and perform for audiences on the street. The venue aims to have a similar cultural impact to Sphere in Las Vegas, though it’s also a more cost-effective place for artists to perform: Artists don’t have to spend a significant amount of money on the production, as the billboards across Times Square include a livestream of the set on stage and promote the project — in Madonna’s case, Confessions II .
Says Dave Cogan, partner and head of creative solutions at Innovative Partnerships Group: “The authenticity of the integration with the experience is what’s most valuable for brands now.”
