OP
OP
Sooo small
The Final Countdown - U2 at Sphere - General Discussion Thread Part 3
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so I can see an issue - the Underhang!
Some in those seats might miss the front of the band the way the stage is constructed. Assuming stage will be pushed all the way to the back to remove that as an issue, but could still see where people in that section and higher sections have the front of the stage cut off from their view.
Great view of the screen, tho
Some in those seats might miss the front of the band the way the stage is constructed. Assuming stage will be pushed all the way to the back to remove that as an issue, but could still see where people in that section and higher sections have the front of the stage cut off from their view.
Great view of the screen, tho
rosephile
Refugee
This is a philosophical question. How many sides to a sphere?
OP
OP
he has another video on his story
https://instagram.com/stories/darre...e=ig_story_item_share&igshid=ODk2MDJkZDc2Zg==
https://instagram.com/stories/darre...e=ig_story_item_share&igshid=ODk2MDJkZDc2Zg==
I think it’ll be like the Beacon where the stage is far enough back to be seen from all levels, even the steep uppers. At Beacon the stage juts out but the band setup is always further back for that very reason.
prbiker15
Blue Crack Addict
hwow: 
gvox
Ghost of Love
Play this in your headphones. :holyshit:
ascender_RS
Refugee
Yip, GA looks great and as expected, it's going to be a different experience depending on where you're sitting.
Really makes me wonder how they're going to use the screens though - i.e. those in GA are going to have a great view of the band with no need to see them on the screen in their immediate range of vision.
But as you get in to the higher seats, presumably they'll be wanting to show some images of the band themselves in amongst whatever other visuals are going on.
ascender_RS
Refugee
I wonder how they're going to spin this on the FB group now. What have we had for the last few months?
- GA all the way, its all about being up close to the band
- GA sucks, never wanted it anyway... got to be in the 100s
- Dammit, overhang!
- I always wanted a seat in the 400s
- Its all about the screen!
- Wow, GA looks great, going to be a great view of the band
- Anyone want to trade their GA for some seats? They come with a great view of the screens
etc.
OP
OP
a few things i spotted in darren aronofsky's video... hidden in spoiler tags for those who don't want to see the screen until the show...
a lot of people are assuming that the darker gray markings on the floor show where the stage and crowd barriers will be.
strongly disagree there.
what i think that thinner dark gray line is is where the 100 level ends when the stands are fully pulled out all the way to row 1. we've already seen that they won't be pulled all the way out for the U2 shows - with tickets starting at row 12.
the darker line? i dunno - they did show a more basic stage for some events on the renderings. it's likely that this is what's going on there - something related to that stage.
you can see it all here -
there are also covered bass drums down on the floor
this is very interesting.
i can't be certain as the resolution of the video isn't great - but it LOOKS like you can see the end of the part of the 100s that would be under the "underhang" in that shot. could be wrong... maybe it's just a seat, or something there temporarily... but if that IS the end, then the impact of the overhang is wildly over stated.
guess we'll all find out in a few weeks.
a lot of people are assuming that the darker gray markings on the floor show where the stage and crowd barriers will be.
strongly disagree there.
what i think that thinner dark gray line is is where the 100 level ends when the stands are fully pulled out all the way to row 1. we've already seen that they won't be pulled all the way out for the U2 shows - with tickets starting at row 12.
the darker line? i dunno - they did show a more basic stage for some events on the renderings. it's likely that this is what's going on there - something related to that stage.
you can see it all here -
there are also covered bass drums down on the floor
this is very interesting.
i can't be certain as the resolution of the video isn't great - but it LOOKS like you can see the end of the part of the 100s that would be under the "underhang" in that shot. could be wrong... maybe it's just a seat, or something there temporarily... but if that IS the end, then the impact of the overhang is wildly over stated.
guess we'll all find out in a few weeks.
I’m going to go with the same shit that’s been the case for the last 2 U2 arena runs: GA will be great if you’re focused on the band, their presence and performances; seats will be great if you want to take in the entire production/“show”
Any full screen-ish video will likely read best to the 200s and 300s, based on scale and eye levels, which… I think we kinda already guessed?
400s are going to have a more distanced view of, again, the whole thing! for a fraction of typical Vegas prices
400s are going to have a more distanced view of, again, the whole thing! for a fraction of typical Vegas prices
OP
OP
Bloomberg News
James Dolan’s $2.3 Billion Sphere Is Raising Eyebrows—in a Good Way
The soon-to-open arena is already the weirdest draw in Vegas. It also just might be the future of entertainment.
By Devin Leonard
September 12, 2023 at 6:00 AM EDT
For the last several years, Las Vegas pleasure seekers might have been puzzled as they gazed westward from the Strip. Looming in the distance was a 366-foot-tall sphere. The dark orb bore a familial resemblance to the Death Star but lacked any signage offering a clue to its purpose. It was obviously an attraction, but what kind?
If the Sphere were actually a space station, its commander would be James Dolan, the irascible scion of the family that controls some of New York’s most famous venues and two of the city’s sports franchises. He’s a figure of dubious celebrity on his home turf, where he’s blamed for the seemingly perpetual mediocrity of the Knicks and derided for fronting what some would consider a high-priced vanity roots-rock band, JD & the Straight Shot. For the better part of a decade, Dolan has been at work on the enormous spherical structure in the Nevada desert in an unlikely bid to establish himself as a man of vision.
Dolan has his own preferred sci-fi metaphor for the building: He’s said it was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s classic The Veldt, where children can project anything they imagine on their nursery’s walls. With that image in mind, he and his company set out to build an event venue with 17,500 seats, an interior wallpapered with “the highest-resolution LED screen on Earth” and a glowing exterior that made it look in early renderings like a fireball dropped from the sky. The world’s bigger musical acts would be offered the privilege of doing extended residencies and experimenting with the Sphere’s novel technology. During the day, the Sphere would morph into a tourist attraction, outdoing a giant-screened IMAX theater experience with its own superpumped arsenal of “immersive entertainment” flourishes, including wind effects, temperature shifts, seats shaking and scents wafting through the building. Kevin Reichard, editor of the trade publication Arena Digest, struggles to find the appropriate words to describe it. “It’s just so far advanced in terms of capabilities, I don’t have any baseline comparison,” he says.
Locating the Sphere in Las Vegas was an obvious choice, but the venue would be only the first in a global constellation. Dolan set out to build a second Sphere in London as work on the first one was just beginning.
This had the potential to go badly, as anyone who’s read all the way to the end of The Veldt knows: The children dream up an African grassland so realistic that lions devour their parents. The Sphere’s narrative arc seemed to be bending in a similarly troubling direction, as pandemic-related delays pushed its opening date back years and cost increases added more than $1 billion to its original estimated price, eventually bringing the total to $2.3 billion. Dolan shuffled the project between different family-controlled companies, recombining assets that had previously been split apart and selling others to help fund the exorbitantly expensive venue, which is now part of an entity known as Sphere Entertainment Co. Even a 15-second Super Bowl ad announcing that U2 would be headlining a series of kickoff shows, scheduled to begin on Sept. 29, did little to alter the minds of those who’d written off the Sphere as an all-but-certain disaster. “How many red flags do you need to see that this is just a boondoggle in the making?” says Scott Roeben, founder of Vital Vegas, a lively blog about the casino town.
Then, on July 4, the Sphere’s exterior began to swirl with images of clouds, stars and molten lava. A leering jack-o’-lantern appeared, then the fiery planet Mars, a geodesic dome, a snow globe, a hideous gigantic eyeball and video-game-worthy tableaux of extraterrestrial and undersea worlds. Pedestrians stopped to marvel. Traffic slowed. Twitter users piled on with superlatives, from “freaking amazing!” to “so epic!!!”
Within a week, Sphere Entertainment’s shares, previously in the doldrums, were up 25%. It turned out that Dolan’s pet project was looking way cooler than many had expected. “The whispers in the industry for a long time have been somewhat dismissive of this,” says Nathan Hubbard, former chief executive officer of Ticketmaster and co-founder of the music startup Firebird. “There’s going to be a lot of people with their foot in their mouth.”
It’s not so easy to cheer for James Dolan. His family’s fortune largely flowed from their cable company—not the sort of business that tends to have appreciative customers. His tenure with the Knicks has been marked by poor on-court performance, head-scratching personnel moves and a protracted conflict with beloved former star Charles Oakley, who was forcibly removed from Madison Square Garden during a 2017 game after he allegedly heckled Dolan. (Litigation stemming from the event is ongoing.)
Dolan has drawn criticism for vowing to use facial recognition technology to identify antagonists, whether they’re “confrontational” fans or lawyers who’ve sued his companies, and ban them from his arenas. When the New York State Liquor Authority embarked on an investigation of the lawyer-barring policy, Dolan threatened to halt alcohol sales during hockey games. “They’re basically doing this for publicity, so we’re going to give them some publicity,” he told Fox 5, looking as though nothing would give him more pleasure. (He never followed through.)
Dolan declined to be interviewed for this article. But soon after the lighting up of the Sphere’s outer skin, he made a surprise appearance in July at the venue, where reporters had been invited for a demonstration of its sound system. Dolan looked slightly disheveled in his blue blazer and white polo shirt, but he still had the air of someone who responds best to genuflection. A publicist told journalists that Dolan’s presence showed how important the Sphere’s audio quality is to him. “That’s a lie,” Dolan scoffed. “I was in town for another reason.”
Still, since he was there, he was eager to show it off. Dolan assured the crowd that the Sphere’s sophisticated technology meant audiences would experience their favorite artists in a new way. He also suggested that musicians who are used to getting away with sloppiness at other venues would be in for a surprise. “Mistakes won’t be covered up by distortion,” he warned. “If you sing a wrong note, everyone’s going to hear it.”
Then he took a seat while others described the way the audio system would use algorithms to ensure that the howls of a lead singer or the bowing of a string section sound the same to everyone, no matter where they sit. “Tell ’em about the seats!” Dolan interrupted, spurring an explanation of how they’d been designed to replicate human skin, so the sound in the arena won’t change no matter how many seats are filled. He then sat back, grinning at times, as his staff cranked up the system to play demos featuring the Beatles, J.Lo, Pitbull and U2, before closing with a rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody that swelled to a deafening crescendo. “If you want to blow your ears out, we’ll blow your ears out,” Dolan boasted.
That the Sphere has come this far speaks to Dolan’s perseverance—or perhaps his obstinacy. The project’s origin dates to 2016, the year he and his family sold their longtime crown jewel, Cablevision—then the fifth-largest cable-TV system in the US—to billionaire Patrick Drahi’s Altice for $18 billion. This might have freed up Dolan to devote more time to JD & the Straight Shot. Instead, he surprised David Dibble, Cablevision’s former chief technology officer, during a dinner in New York by drawing a globelike shape on a notepad and telling him it was a rough sketch of the venue of the future. “We don’t even have to have a sign,” Dibble remembers his boss saying. “They’re going to see that building and say, ‘Yep, MSG.’ ”
It would be Dibble’s job, as head of the newly created MSG Ventures, to find the tech that could make the Sphere a reality. He says he set off on a global tour, meeting with potential suppliers who often informed him that he and his boss were out of their minds. A beach ball-like building would be an acoustical nightmare; why were Dolan and his employees even thinking about staging rock concerts in one? “It’s like taking a giant laundry basket full of pingpong balls and tossing them on the kitchen floor, they’re just bouncing all over the place,” Dibble acknowledges. “That’s your audio experience.”
To help with the sound system, Dibble’s team invested an undisclosed amount in a German company called Holoplot that had created a means of beaming announcements around cavernous rail stations. To work on illuminating the building, it purchased Obscura Digital, a San Francisco-based creative studio specializing in immersive fare that had recently projected skyscraper-size photos of Jennifer Aniston and Audrey Hepburn on the Empire State Building to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Harper’s Bazaar. The challenge was developing content for the enormous high-resolution inner screen that didn’t make audiences snacking on popcorn feel like vomiting. “It can make you very, very sick,” says Travis Threlkel, the former chief creative officer of Obscura Digital who worked on the Sphere for three years before leaving Dolan’s company in 2019 and is now co-founder of Minds Over Matter, a similar firm. “You know, motion sick.” Dolan subsequently decided to scrap projection in favor of LED lighting, which the company believed would be more lifelike. It says it’s still laboring to ensure viewers don’t get queasy.
The Sphere was to be located on 18 acres of vacant land near the Strip, leased from the late billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. Adelson’s company would contribute $75 million to help fund the construction of a pedestrian bridge linking the Sphere with its sprawling Venetian resort.
Local politicians were thrilled about the prospect of Sphere at the Venetian—the venue’s official name. “Now that’s what I’m talking about right there,” said Lawrence Weekly, then a member of the Clark County Board of Commissioners, at a 2018 hearing on the project. “That’s how you change the game.” Dolan offered his own wet kiss to, as he put it, “all of Las Vegas and Nevada” at a groundbreaking ceremony that same year featuring a troupe of shovel-wielding dancers. “You’re the right place for this,” Dolan said. “You showed us you’re the right place.”
His company unveiled its preliminary estimate in 2019: $1.2 billion to build, with an opening scheduled in 2021. Then Covid-19 sent up the cost of labor, steel, computer chips and all kinds of other things needed for a billion-dollar development project. Subcontractors put liens on the property, saying they hadn’t been paid. In December 2020, Dolan’s company terminated Aecom Hunt, the Sphere’s general contractor. The firm responded with a breach-of-contract suit in Clark County District Court in Nevada, saying it was still owed $5 million. Dolan’s company countersued, blaming Aecom Hunt for the Sphere’s cost overruns. By June 2021 the project’s estimated price had swelled to $1.8 billion. (Neither Sphere Entertainment nor Aecom Hunt would discuss the litigation.)
At the time, the live music industry was still struggling to recover from the pandemic. Dolan’s company warned in a public filing that the Sphere had to be substantially completed by September 2023 or Las Vegas Sands could terminate its lease for the property. So the company kept pouring in cash, and not just on the primary site. In 2021 the company won approval to build what was effectively a mini-Sphere: a 100-foot-tall replica of the domed theater in Burbank, California. It was here that employees of what would be known as Sphere Studios would experiment with developing content for the Vegas venue.
“It’s all kind of amazing. But look, it all has to work. Who do we blame if it doesn’t work?”
One of the problems they still needed to solve was finding the best way to capture high-resolution images suitable for the Sphere’s enormous inner screen. Initially, the Studios team cobbled together 15 different cameras mounted on a rack, stitching the results together into a single image. But the device was too weighty and the stitching process too cumbersome. So they designed their own single-lens camera known as Big Sky, the centerpiece of which was a 3-by-3-inch digital sensor to capture images just as film does in a traditional movie camera.
Other people in the industry warned Dolan’s camera people that a sensor that size would crack or melt. But Big Sky ended up working, and Dolan’s company has since patented much of its technology. Executives decline to say how much the camera cost. “We can put it this way,” says Andrew Shulkind, a senior vice president at Sphere Studios and a cinematographer who’s worked on movies such as Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence and David Fincher’s Panic Room. “It was worth it to us.” Whatever numbers may have been involved, the executives say, Dolan didn’t flinch.
Finally, Dolan’s company struck a deal with U2 to open the Sphere by its September 2023 deadline. Bono, U2’s frontman and shoulder-rubber of world leaders, seemed characteristically ebullient during a visit to the venue with the band’s guitarist the Edge, captured on video by Apple Music. “How cool is that?” he said, standing outside the enormous building, still forbiddingly dark. “It’s light years ahead of everything that’s out there,” the Edge agreed.
Upon entering the Sphere, the rock stars gushed about its advanced sound system and the imagery they might conjure up on the massive LED screen. “It’s all kind of amazing,” Bono said, gazing around the building. “But look, it all has to work. Who do we blame if it doesn’t work?”
Bono will have reason to be forgiving of Sphere Entertainment, because even if things go awry creatively, they’re set to work out for his band financially. It’s been widely reported that U2 is being paid $10 million to be Dolan’s test case and will snag 90% of the ticket sales for its stint, which has been extended to 25 shows. The band will perform its 1991 album, Achtung Baby. The company declined to discuss its deal with U2, but says the shows are almost sold out.
Dolan’s company has revealed that Hollywood auteur Darren Aronofsky is directing Sphere’s first immersive movie, Postcard From Earth. The movie, which premieres on Oct. 6, will feature, among other things, footage of sharks and the innards of a volcano. While such stuff has always been standard IMAX fare, having Aronofsky—a filmmaker best known for hard-to-watch films about heroin addicts and a psychotic ballerina—is a potentially intriguing twist. Audiences had better be impressed, given that tickets start at $49.
Dolan’s company is recruiting creative types to do installations on the building’s exterior, which it calls the Exosphere; the first, a swirling “AI data sculpture” by media artist Refik Anadol, debuted on Sept. 1. It also sees the Exosphere as a revenue source and has boasted that companies will be able to use it to hawk their brands not just to drivers and pavement pounders, but to passersby in airplanes overhead. In early September, YouTube launched the first major Exosphere ad campaign, decorating the surface with football helmets to promote its subscriptions offering NFL games.
Dolan’s company won’t say how much money it’s receiving, but Martin Porter, head of out-of-home advertising for Dentsu Media US, an ad-buying agency, says Sphere Entertainment is seeking $650,000 a week from prospective advertisers to grace the Sphere’s exterior. “It’s very expensive compared to anything else on the market,” he says. Dolan’s company declined to comment. Porter adds that the Sphere’s globe-shaped screen won’t be flattering in every situation. He offers the example of Britney Spears, who has a forthcoming memoir to promote. “If you want to put Britney’s face on that,” he says, “you’re going to be very careful.”
In late August, Dolan participated in a Sphere Entertainment quarterly earnings call to reassure investors on the eve of the Sphere’s opening. He spoke enthusiastically about the venue and alluded to future residencies by artists “maybe not as high-profile as U2, but close”—while also confessing that he hadn’t planned to spend so much.
While Dolan did hold out the possibility of building other Spheres, he said he’d rely on business partners to help pay for them. Initial success in Vegas could help attract interest. But the very things that make the Sphere ideal for Las Vegas could work against it elsewhere.
This is the case in London, where the public reception has been notably less enthusiastic. After years of fierce debate, in March 2022 Sphere Entertainment got signoff from the local development corporation overseeing the former parking lot in the working-class Stratford area of East London where the venue is slated to go. The project must still be considered by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and he’s being pressed by residents to withhold his approval. The mayor’s press office declined to comment. In May the London Assembly’s environmental committee issued a report condemning light pollution in the city, urging Khan to reject Dolan’s shining orb. Dolan’s executives have said the London Sphere won’t be illuminated as brightly as its Vegas sibling or for as many hours of the day. Even so, four years in, nothing has been built.
Lyn Brown, the member of Parliament representing the area where the Sphere would rise, says Dolan’s company is “frankly very confused” if it thinks Stratford is similar to Las Vegas. “We are not in the middle of a desert with few people nearby who will have their lives blighted,” she says. “Some of my constituents who’ve overcome many barriers to find a home now face living next to an enormous orb that will beam directly into their apartments.”
Perhaps no one has a better feeling for this than Ceren Sonmez and her husband, Alessandro Galletta, who live in a third-floor apartment with Sid, their cat, directly overlooking the site on which the Sphere could one day emerge in all its blazing glory. Sipping strong Turkish tea, the couple say they bought their plant-filled apartment knowing something would inevitably sprout on the adjacent property. “This is London,” Sonmez says. “Of course something’s going to be built there! How could I ever possibly have imagined that it would be this?”
As a sort of peace offering, Dolan’s company has offered residents of such buildings a different kind of dramatic backdrop: blackout curtains
James Dolan’s $2.3 Billion Sphere Is Raising Eyebrows—in a Good Way
The soon-to-open arena is already the weirdest draw in Vegas. It also just might be the future of entertainment.
By Devin Leonard
September 12, 2023 at 6:00 AM EDT
For the last several years, Las Vegas pleasure seekers might have been puzzled as they gazed westward from the Strip. Looming in the distance was a 366-foot-tall sphere. The dark orb bore a familial resemblance to the Death Star but lacked any signage offering a clue to its purpose. It was obviously an attraction, but what kind?
If the Sphere were actually a space station, its commander would be James Dolan, the irascible scion of the family that controls some of New York’s most famous venues and two of the city’s sports franchises. He’s a figure of dubious celebrity on his home turf, where he’s blamed for the seemingly perpetual mediocrity of the Knicks and derided for fronting what some would consider a high-priced vanity roots-rock band, JD & the Straight Shot. For the better part of a decade, Dolan has been at work on the enormous spherical structure in the Nevada desert in an unlikely bid to establish himself as a man of vision.
Dolan has his own preferred sci-fi metaphor for the building: He’s said it was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s classic The Veldt, where children can project anything they imagine on their nursery’s walls. With that image in mind, he and his company set out to build an event venue with 17,500 seats, an interior wallpapered with “the highest-resolution LED screen on Earth” and a glowing exterior that made it look in early renderings like a fireball dropped from the sky. The world’s bigger musical acts would be offered the privilege of doing extended residencies and experimenting with the Sphere’s novel technology. During the day, the Sphere would morph into a tourist attraction, outdoing a giant-screened IMAX theater experience with its own superpumped arsenal of “immersive entertainment” flourishes, including wind effects, temperature shifts, seats shaking and scents wafting through the building. Kevin Reichard, editor of the trade publication Arena Digest, struggles to find the appropriate words to describe it. “It’s just so far advanced in terms of capabilities, I don’t have any baseline comparison,” he says.
Locating the Sphere in Las Vegas was an obvious choice, but the venue would be only the first in a global constellation. Dolan set out to build a second Sphere in London as work on the first one was just beginning.
This had the potential to go badly, as anyone who’s read all the way to the end of The Veldt knows: The children dream up an African grassland so realistic that lions devour their parents. The Sphere’s narrative arc seemed to be bending in a similarly troubling direction, as pandemic-related delays pushed its opening date back years and cost increases added more than $1 billion to its original estimated price, eventually bringing the total to $2.3 billion. Dolan shuffled the project between different family-controlled companies, recombining assets that had previously been split apart and selling others to help fund the exorbitantly expensive venue, which is now part of an entity known as Sphere Entertainment Co. Even a 15-second Super Bowl ad announcing that U2 would be headlining a series of kickoff shows, scheduled to begin on Sept. 29, did little to alter the minds of those who’d written off the Sphere as an all-but-certain disaster. “How many red flags do you need to see that this is just a boondoggle in the making?” says Scott Roeben, founder of Vital Vegas, a lively blog about the casino town.
Then, on July 4, the Sphere’s exterior began to swirl with images of clouds, stars and molten lava. A leering jack-o’-lantern appeared, then the fiery planet Mars, a geodesic dome, a snow globe, a hideous gigantic eyeball and video-game-worthy tableaux of extraterrestrial and undersea worlds. Pedestrians stopped to marvel. Traffic slowed. Twitter users piled on with superlatives, from “freaking amazing!” to “so epic!!!”
Within a week, Sphere Entertainment’s shares, previously in the doldrums, were up 25%. It turned out that Dolan’s pet project was looking way cooler than many had expected. “The whispers in the industry for a long time have been somewhat dismissive of this,” says Nathan Hubbard, former chief executive officer of Ticketmaster and co-founder of the music startup Firebird. “There’s going to be a lot of people with their foot in their mouth.”
It’s not so easy to cheer for James Dolan. His family’s fortune largely flowed from their cable company—not the sort of business that tends to have appreciative customers. His tenure with the Knicks has been marked by poor on-court performance, head-scratching personnel moves and a protracted conflict with beloved former star Charles Oakley, who was forcibly removed from Madison Square Garden during a 2017 game after he allegedly heckled Dolan. (Litigation stemming from the event is ongoing.)
Dolan has drawn criticism for vowing to use facial recognition technology to identify antagonists, whether they’re “confrontational” fans or lawyers who’ve sued his companies, and ban them from his arenas. When the New York State Liquor Authority embarked on an investigation of the lawyer-barring policy, Dolan threatened to halt alcohol sales during hockey games. “They’re basically doing this for publicity, so we’re going to give them some publicity,” he told Fox 5, looking as though nothing would give him more pleasure. (He never followed through.)
Dolan declined to be interviewed for this article. But soon after the lighting up of the Sphere’s outer skin, he made a surprise appearance in July at the venue, where reporters had been invited for a demonstration of its sound system. Dolan looked slightly disheveled in his blue blazer and white polo shirt, but he still had the air of someone who responds best to genuflection. A publicist told journalists that Dolan’s presence showed how important the Sphere’s audio quality is to him. “That’s a lie,” Dolan scoffed. “I was in town for another reason.”
Still, since he was there, he was eager to show it off. Dolan assured the crowd that the Sphere’s sophisticated technology meant audiences would experience their favorite artists in a new way. He also suggested that musicians who are used to getting away with sloppiness at other venues would be in for a surprise. “Mistakes won’t be covered up by distortion,” he warned. “If you sing a wrong note, everyone’s going to hear it.”
Then he took a seat while others described the way the audio system would use algorithms to ensure that the howls of a lead singer or the bowing of a string section sound the same to everyone, no matter where they sit. “Tell ’em about the seats!” Dolan interrupted, spurring an explanation of how they’d been designed to replicate human skin, so the sound in the arena won’t change no matter how many seats are filled. He then sat back, grinning at times, as his staff cranked up the system to play demos featuring the Beatles, J.Lo, Pitbull and U2, before closing with a rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody that swelled to a deafening crescendo. “If you want to blow your ears out, we’ll blow your ears out,” Dolan boasted.
That the Sphere has come this far speaks to Dolan’s perseverance—or perhaps his obstinacy. The project’s origin dates to 2016, the year he and his family sold their longtime crown jewel, Cablevision—then the fifth-largest cable-TV system in the US—to billionaire Patrick Drahi’s Altice for $18 billion. This might have freed up Dolan to devote more time to JD & the Straight Shot. Instead, he surprised David Dibble, Cablevision’s former chief technology officer, during a dinner in New York by drawing a globelike shape on a notepad and telling him it was a rough sketch of the venue of the future. “We don’t even have to have a sign,” Dibble remembers his boss saying. “They’re going to see that building and say, ‘Yep, MSG.’ ”
It would be Dibble’s job, as head of the newly created MSG Ventures, to find the tech that could make the Sphere a reality. He says he set off on a global tour, meeting with potential suppliers who often informed him that he and his boss were out of their minds. A beach ball-like building would be an acoustical nightmare; why were Dolan and his employees even thinking about staging rock concerts in one? “It’s like taking a giant laundry basket full of pingpong balls and tossing them on the kitchen floor, they’re just bouncing all over the place,” Dibble acknowledges. “That’s your audio experience.”
To help with the sound system, Dibble’s team invested an undisclosed amount in a German company called Holoplot that had created a means of beaming announcements around cavernous rail stations. To work on illuminating the building, it purchased Obscura Digital, a San Francisco-based creative studio specializing in immersive fare that had recently projected skyscraper-size photos of Jennifer Aniston and Audrey Hepburn on the Empire State Building to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Harper’s Bazaar. The challenge was developing content for the enormous high-resolution inner screen that didn’t make audiences snacking on popcorn feel like vomiting. “It can make you very, very sick,” says Travis Threlkel, the former chief creative officer of Obscura Digital who worked on the Sphere for three years before leaving Dolan’s company in 2019 and is now co-founder of Minds Over Matter, a similar firm. “You know, motion sick.” Dolan subsequently decided to scrap projection in favor of LED lighting, which the company believed would be more lifelike. It says it’s still laboring to ensure viewers don’t get queasy.
The Sphere was to be located on 18 acres of vacant land near the Strip, leased from the late billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. Adelson’s company would contribute $75 million to help fund the construction of a pedestrian bridge linking the Sphere with its sprawling Venetian resort.
Local politicians were thrilled about the prospect of Sphere at the Venetian—the venue’s official name. “Now that’s what I’m talking about right there,” said Lawrence Weekly, then a member of the Clark County Board of Commissioners, at a 2018 hearing on the project. “That’s how you change the game.” Dolan offered his own wet kiss to, as he put it, “all of Las Vegas and Nevada” at a groundbreaking ceremony that same year featuring a troupe of shovel-wielding dancers. “You’re the right place for this,” Dolan said. “You showed us you’re the right place.”
His company unveiled its preliminary estimate in 2019: $1.2 billion to build, with an opening scheduled in 2021. Then Covid-19 sent up the cost of labor, steel, computer chips and all kinds of other things needed for a billion-dollar development project. Subcontractors put liens on the property, saying they hadn’t been paid. In December 2020, Dolan’s company terminated Aecom Hunt, the Sphere’s general contractor. The firm responded with a breach-of-contract suit in Clark County District Court in Nevada, saying it was still owed $5 million. Dolan’s company countersued, blaming Aecom Hunt for the Sphere’s cost overruns. By June 2021 the project’s estimated price had swelled to $1.8 billion. (Neither Sphere Entertainment nor Aecom Hunt would discuss the litigation.)
At the time, the live music industry was still struggling to recover from the pandemic. Dolan’s company warned in a public filing that the Sphere had to be substantially completed by September 2023 or Las Vegas Sands could terminate its lease for the property. So the company kept pouring in cash, and not just on the primary site. In 2021 the company won approval to build what was effectively a mini-Sphere: a 100-foot-tall replica of the domed theater in Burbank, California. It was here that employees of what would be known as Sphere Studios would experiment with developing content for the Vegas venue.
“It’s all kind of amazing. But look, it all has to work. Who do we blame if it doesn’t work?”
One of the problems they still needed to solve was finding the best way to capture high-resolution images suitable for the Sphere’s enormous inner screen. Initially, the Studios team cobbled together 15 different cameras mounted on a rack, stitching the results together into a single image. But the device was too weighty and the stitching process too cumbersome. So they designed their own single-lens camera known as Big Sky, the centerpiece of which was a 3-by-3-inch digital sensor to capture images just as film does in a traditional movie camera.
Other people in the industry warned Dolan’s camera people that a sensor that size would crack or melt. But Big Sky ended up working, and Dolan’s company has since patented much of its technology. Executives decline to say how much the camera cost. “We can put it this way,” says Andrew Shulkind, a senior vice president at Sphere Studios and a cinematographer who’s worked on movies such as Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence and David Fincher’s Panic Room. “It was worth it to us.” Whatever numbers may have been involved, the executives say, Dolan didn’t flinch.
Finally, Dolan’s company struck a deal with U2 to open the Sphere by its September 2023 deadline. Bono, U2’s frontman and shoulder-rubber of world leaders, seemed characteristically ebullient during a visit to the venue with the band’s guitarist the Edge, captured on video by Apple Music. “How cool is that?” he said, standing outside the enormous building, still forbiddingly dark. “It’s light years ahead of everything that’s out there,” the Edge agreed.
Upon entering the Sphere, the rock stars gushed about its advanced sound system and the imagery they might conjure up on the massive LED screen. “It’s all kind of amazing,” Bono said, gazing around the building. “But look, it all has to work. Who do we blame if it doesn’t work?”
Bono will have reason to be forgiving of Sphere Entertainment, because even if things go awry creatively, they’re set to work out for his band financially. It’s been widely reported that U2 is being paid $10 million to be Dolan’s test case and will snag 90% of the ticket sales for its stint, which has been extended to 25 shows. The band will perform its 1991 album, Achtung Baby. The company declined to discuss its deal with U2, but says the shows are almost sold out.
Dolan’s company has revealed that Hollywood auteur Darren Aronofsky is directing Sphere’s first immersive movie, Postcard From Earth. The movie, which premieres on Oct. 6, will feature, among other things, footage of sharks and the innards of a volcano. While such stuff has always been standard IMAX fare, having Aronofsky—a filmmaker best known for hard-to-watch films about heroin addicts and a psychotic ballerina—is a potentially intriguing twist. Audiences had better be impressed, given that tickets start at $49.
Dolan’s company is recruiting creative types to do installations on the building’s exterior, which it calls the Exosphere; the first, a swirling “AI data sculpture” by media artist Refik Anadol, debuted on Sept. 1. It also sees the Exosphere as a revenue source and has boasted that companies will be able to use it to hawk their brands not just to drivers and pavement pounders, but to passersby in airplanes overhead. In early September, YouTube launched the first major Exosphere ad campaign, decorating the surface with football helmets to promote its subscriptions offering NFL games.
Dolan’s company won’t say how much money it’s receiving, but Martin Porter, head of out-of-home advertising for Dentsu Media US, an ad-buying agency, says Sphere Entertainment is seeking $650,000 a week from prospective advertisers to grace the Sphere’s exterior. “It’s very expensive compared to anything else on the market,” he says. Dolan’s company declined to comment. Porter adds that the Sphere’s globe-shaped screen won’t be flattering in every situation. He offers the example of Britney Spears, who has a forthcoming memoir to promote. “If you want to put Britney’s face on that,” he says, “you’re going to be very careful.”
In late August, Dolan participated in a Sphere Entertainment quarterly earnings call to reassure investors on the eve of the Sphere’s opening. He spoke enthusiastically about the venue and alluded to future residencies by artists “maybe not as high-profile as U2, but close”—while also confessing that he hadn’t planned to spend so much.
While Dolan did hold out the possibility of building other Spheres, he said he’d rely on business partners to help pay for them. Initial success in Vegas could help attract interest. But the very things that make the Sphere ideal for Las Vegas could work against it elsewhere.
This is the case in London, where the public reception has been notably less enthusiastic. After years of fierce debate, in March 2022 Sphere Entertainment got signoff from the local development corporation overseeing the former parking lot in the working-class Stratford area of East London where the venue is slated to go. The project must still be considered by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and he’s being pressed by residents to withhold his approval. The mayor’s press office declined to comment. In May the London Assembly’s environmental committee issued a report condemning light pollution in the city, urging Khan to reject Dolan’s shining orb. Dolan’s executives have said the London Sphere won’t be illuminated as brightly as its Vegas sibling or for as many hours of the day. Even so, four years in, nothing has been built.
Lyn Brown, the member of Parliament representing the area where the Sphere would rise, says Dolan’s company is “frankly very confused” if it thinks Stratford is similar to Las Vegas. “We are not in the middle of a desert with few people nearby who will have their lives blighted,” she says. “Some of my constituents who’ve overcome many barriers to find a home now face living next to an enormous orb that will beam directly into their apartments.”
Perhaps no one has a better feeling for this than Ceren Sonmez and her husband, Alessandro Galletta, who live in a third-floor apartment with Sid, their cat, directly overlooking the site on which the Sphere could one day emerge in all its blazing glory. Sipping strong Turkish tea, the couple say they bought their plant-filled apartment knowing something would inevitably sprout on the adjacent property. “This is London,” Sonmez says. “Of course something’s going to be built there! How could I ever possibly have imagined that it would be this?”
As a sort of peace offering, Dolan’s company has offered residents of such buildings a different kind of dramatic backdrop: blackout curtains
Hewson
Blue Crack Supplier
I mean, yeah, he posted a really long article, and the mod power has gone to his head, but you shouldn't call him an asshole.
OP
OP
Damn you
Disagree! Long live Asshole Headache.
gvox
Ghost of Love
OP
OP
when it's bright out, instead of just sending random pixels across the LEDs, they should totally change it to flying toasters.
TinKnight
Refugee
I literally cannot decide between GA and seats, why am I like this.
OP
OP
Ok I think it's time to mute this stupid Facebook group...
OP
OP
Like - you want to dress up to go to the show? Hey - not my cup of tea, but do you. Mark wears his mirror ball stuff and does his thing and that's all cool.
But when you start to do this stuff... the dressing up and doing videos... omg it's so cringe.
But when you start to do this stuff... the dressing up and doing videos... omg it's so cringe.
Hewson
Blue Crack Supplier
I think cringe is putting it mildly.
This to me looks more like obsessive/delusional behavior.
This to me looks more like obsessive/delusional behavior.
Someone should tell Gabe to stop.
gvox
Ghost of Love
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