Today, Explained - One year of Sphere

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

The Las Vegas Sphere was supposed to be the future of live entertainment. But just over a year into its run, New York Post writer Josh Kosman explains why the math ain’t mathin’. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members The realistic eyeball that kept watch over Las Vegas was one of Sphere's early breakout hits. Photo by K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first thing you need to know about The Sphere in Las Vegas is... Don't call it that. It's Sphere, not The Sphere. Lose the The. But everyone calls it The Sphere, so we will too. The Sphere opened just over a year ago. They said it would be the future of entertainment, and some people go and really do feel that way.

But others, including those of us at Today Explained, are wondering if this whole operation is sustainable. So on the show today we're going to look back at one year of the sphere. From Bono to Fish to Dead & Co to the Eagles to that documentary that Darren Aronofsky made, to the upcoming EDM New Year's Eve rave that they're throwing. And we're going to ask whether this really could be the future of fun, or maybe it's just another Las Vegas bust. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk,

an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions

or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today, Explain talked to a whole bunch of people about their experiences going to shows at the Sphere, and that is what you're about to hear. It's funny because obviously Vegas is famous for glitz and lights and flashy stuff that's designed to catch your attention. And at first, before I had seen it in person, I thought, well, this is just going to feel like a heightened version of that. But it looks like a spaceship landed in the middle of Vegas. Like, it's just wild looking.

And they do so many fun and creative things that they project on the outside of the sphere. I mean, sometimes they do commercials and advertising, which I get. But, like, I think the first time I saw it was when they had, like, a cute, like, kind of cartoon face that would change its expressions. The first part of the experience is making your way from the Venetian along this long corridor or skyway to the actual base of the sphere. There's different sections of that, but one of them is this seemingly endless carpeted hallway that I remember as being sort of red and gold, like the Kremlin or one of Saddam Hussein's palaces. carpeted hallway that I remember as being sort of red and gold, like, you know,

like the Kremlin or like one of Saddam Hussein's palaces. You know, it's sort of garish, sort of ugly, endless. Every 40 yards or whatever to your right is another giant convention hall. You know, it's just the scale of it is bizarre. And you're in this river of other people. And I just remember on the first night, this like extreme nervous energy among everyone, like just no one knew what to expect. And what was really cool about it is that, you know, in the fish world, there's people that have been to like hundreds of shows. And this was the first time for everyone, including the band. But it spills you back outside. So suddenly you go from being in the air-conditioned Saddam Hussein Palace out onto this, you know, 110-degree hardpan asphalt lot.

Where I was surprised by how it looked up close. It almost looks like a giant light bright. It's like these kind of pretty big single lights and pegs kind of coming out. My sort of engineer boy brain was sort of going into overdrive, like, ah, how does that work? That's amazing. Look at that. Look at that. My first impression walking in there was, how are they going to get all these people through these lines

fast enough to actually make the show? And, I mean, within 10, 15 minutes, everybody was through. But then once you're actually inside, I apologize for using sci-fi metaphors, but it really does have that feeling. It's just the way it's lit. It's kind of dark, but things are kind of glowing. There's escalators that take you up to the higher levels.

There was ambient music, this special U2 mix that they had made that was kind of playing in the lobby area. So when you first enter the lobby and get into the foyer, there's a bunch of animatronic robots that are interactive that you can speak to, ask questions, and they'll respond. They're humanoid. They look a little bit like C-3PO maybe. You could try to start a conversation with one and it would kind of answer based on whatever information was polling. It could get your name, which was kind of eerie. Hello, Grace. Are you Graceful? And, you know, we've all heard the surveillance stories of a lot

of the venues, especially the Jim Dolan ones. And, you know, there was certainly that feel to it too. Like the staff was extremely attentive in a way that I've never really felt, like, at any big event like that. You also just got the sense that, like, you were being watched everywhere you go. Then you go inside, and it's also beautiful to behold inside because it's, you know, the sphere at rest prior to the show, it had this sort of, it projected onto the screen

an illusion of the armature of the building. And when the show started, the inner workings of the sphere looked like it was starting to open. What looked like the sphere opening stopped at the lightning bolt, which is a symbol, a Grateful Dead symbol. But what really happens is i think it's the second song if i remember correctly again that where the where the suddenly they it cracks open you know the armature disappears and you know you're outside their old house that old victorian and then the camera or the or the perspectives slowly pulls away from the house and goes into the air, you know, like a balloon or a helicopter. And you slowly pull away from the city of San Francisco, above the peninsula, over the bay.

You can see, you know, the fault lines and the hills. And you can identify, if you've ever lived there as I have, you identify where you lived, where you went, you know, which parks you went to, where your friends lived, where your friends lived, and then, you know, and then it winds up delivering you into space. And then the first thing that hit me after that was the International Space Station came flying by, and it made a huge noise. And it really startled me, and I said, wow, this is really, this is just amazing.

This whole venue is just amazing. Probably half a dozen times, I felt, I don't think the phones worked in there, I can't remember, but I felt like I wanted to tell everybody I know, you have to come check this out. I would say the band was like, you know, 5% to 10% of my visual field. That's probably even high, like 5%.

You know, and the rest is the screen. So Fish's visuals were a little more out there, if you will. They were pretty wild. One was like a puppy, except it was giant. It was like King Kong-sized puppy just licking the screen of the sphere. So like just imagine like a tongue dragging. And it was like super like gross and weird, but also really cool. Like I felt like I was trapped inside a marble and a dog was licking me. And but just I was like like what crazy mind came up with this and then a third type of visual and I noticed this more with the dead than with fish there were more traditional visuals where it was just like the band so it was just either just a static shot of the whole band on the stage and playing or maybe close-ups of a couple of musicians so those were fun and they

were nice but also I've seen I know what those guys look like so you know it was fun and they were nice, but also I've seen, I know what those guys look like. So, you know, it was fun and nice to have, but I really enjoyed the scenery and the new stuff more. You know you're not in the real world, but every other thing that's happening to your senses is telling you that you're wrong and that you actually are. There's a moment in U2's set where the streets have no name and they have a sunrise and it continues to rise and eventually set by the time the song is done. I knew I wasn't out in the desert under a blazing sun, but my brain didn't really comprehend that. It felt like that's where you were. I would definitely caution anyone that's prone to motion sickness to maybe take some Dramamine or something beforehand. I'm personally prone to it. So I came prepared, fortunately, but I definitely felt the impact of it. One thing that was fun, you know, as I'm becoming an older lady, I like to sit down at concerts a lot. And it's a great place

to sit at a concert because your actual chair has like haptic feedback. You know know it's like a gamer chair it was really cool to hear some of the songs and like really feel the the beat and to also just like really be getting good sound a lot of times you go to concerts and just by virtue of where you're sitting there's some weird echo or something's tinny or whatever it is at fish we'd be up there they they'd be rocking out, jamming, we're all dancing, having fun. And then all of a sudden you'd hear like a tom-tom drum that sounded like it was straight above you, or a couple of keys from the piano that sounded like

it was coming from a corner. And everyone would kind of look up and look over there while that sound was happening for five seconds, then would go away. We would all kind of look at each other and say, hey, did we just hear keys coming from straight above us? Did you all hear that too? One thing about the Sphere venue is that it's a lot more controlled than a normal dead-end company experience would be. There were some people smoking, but not as many. It was not like I've been to shows where you couldn't see the stage because there was so much smoke in between you and the stage that it was hard to see.

Very different than, like, a Madison Square Garden fish show where, you know, you come home, like, smelling like an ashtray. There was sort of a classy feel to it. You know, everyone was kind of on their best behavior. I think this idea of, like, the immersion that it represents, I do think that that's the future of entertainment, but I'm afraid,

what I really fear is that the real future is sort of each of us plugged into our own virtual reality feed, whether it's with goggles or glasses or even whatever brain projections we can you know we can project onto the inside of our eyeballs if that makes any sense without having

to go anywhere or be with other people um and we just kind of you know we'll be you know as as father john misty put it you know making love to taylor swift and the oculus rift you know and and everybody will have their own individual curated fake reality, you know, be like the Matrix will just be like floating in our in some sort of weird amniotic state and feeding our minds with whatever entertainment we want. I mean, we're kind of halfway there already. But so, you know, I'd be happy if the sphere was was as dystopic as it got. You know?

But I fear that's not the case. I don't think it's the future. I think it's now. I think it is the best. I haven't been to every venue in the world. But I can't imagine there's a venue right now that delivers a better live music experience than Sphere. And if this even progresses and gets better and better and better, I don't know how it could get any more intense. I don't know that I would say, I mean, first of all, I don't even,

I don't think they're necessarily making money, nor who knows when they ever will. So in that sense, I don't know that it's the future. But I think if you're a band, like it should be one of your goals or one of your stops. My concern about the sphere is just the way that they're booking it. So far, there have been four bands, U2, Dead & Company, Phish, and then the Eagles. And I'm like, can you guys book anyone that didn't exist until after 1990? They just haven't done anybody a little bit younger,

and I don't know if that's a calculated decision because they feel like older people are maybe more willing to spend disposable income on this experience and a whole trip to Vegas, but I really think they need to get some other kinds of flavors in there. That was Alan Rosenthal, Scott Zellner, Scott Wright, and Commander David Llewellyn, and also New York Magazine's Jen Chaney, The Ringer's Katie Baker, and The New Yorker's Nick Palmgarden, who have all written great dispatches from The Sphere. Go read them if you're thinking of going yourself. The Sphere was supposed to be the future of entertainment.

Why they keep booking your dad's favorite bands when we're back on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. If you're a finance manager, you're probably used to having to toggle between multiple disjointed tools just to keep track of everything. And sometimes that means there's limited visibility on business spend. I don't know what any of that means, but Ramp might be able to help. Ramp is a corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your back pocket. Ramp's accounting software automatically collects receipts, categorizes your expenses in real time. You can say goodbye to manual expense reports you will never have to chase down a receipt again you can customize spending limits and restrictions so your employees are empowered to purchase what

your business needs and you can have peace of mind and now you can get 250 when you join ramp you go to ramp.com slash explained ramp. go to Ramp.com slash Explained, Ramp.com slash Explained, R-A-M-P.com slash Explained. Cards are issued by Sutton Bank, a member of the New York Post, which somehow makes him one of the foremost authorities on the sphere in Las Vegas. Well, we're sort of a national paper. Not sort of. We're a national paper.

And certainly media and entertainment are important to us. And James Dolan, Jimmy Dolan, owns the Sphere. And Jimmy Dolan also owns the New York Knicks and New York Rangers and is quite an iconic and somewhat disliked New York figure. So he makes it interesting for us. We asked Josh to tell us how the Sphere came to be. This has been Jimmy Dolan's dream for several years, perhaps five to ten years. He is very into music. He plays in a band.

This next song is the title song of our record. And it is called Ballyhoo. In fact, he opened for the Eagles at one time. People who know him would say that his true love is music, perhaps more than even owning the sports teams. So he's had this idea of this one-of-a-kind, technologically advanced sphere for a long time. He thought it would cost a billion dollars to build. It ended up costing

$2.3 billion. It was a big, big cost overrun. And that really begins the interesting story of the sphere, because his dream, to a degree, has been realized. Within a year, the sphere is quite iconic. From a technological perspective, it largely works. People are wowed by it. Yet he has not figured out how to make money. In fact, he's losing quite a bit of money on the sphere. The problem is it's very hard to make money off concerts. Taylor Swift has made $2 billion.

Well, Taylor's the performer. It's not hard for a performer to make money off concerts. Taylor Swift has made $2 billion. Well, Taylor's the performer. It's not hard for a performer to make money. It's hard for the arena to make money. So not just here, really, at any big arena, the artist will make anywhere from 80% to 100% of concert revenues. Then the arena itself might make money off parking, which there's not much here at the Sphere, or merchandise. And here, the added problem is U2, for example, it cost them more than $10 million to build a technological set that would match the music, because there is no other arena like the Sphere. So Dolan agreed to pay more than $10 million to produce their show.

Then during their show itself, U2 made roughly 90% of ticket sales. That's not leaving a lot left over. And that's a real problem because the real way Dolan makes money is these movies. Those he can make money off of. But the concerts, not much. But it's funny you say that because I was in Vegas for a weekend where there weren't any concerts. There was just this movie, this sort of, you know, climate documentary made by Darren Aronofsky. And I couldn't find, you know, reviews from movie critics, probably because they couldn't all make it to Vegas,

but you could find reviews from people who went to see it and they were scathing reviews. It is simply not worth the money. It's 2024. I'll need more than mountain visuals to be impressed. The film itself is indescribably bad. I feel entitled to compensation at this point. It did not scream, this is the future of the sphere's business model.

No, and the problem is these movies cost a lot to produce because you're producing them for this one-of-a-kind sphere. So they're about to spend, or they're're spending about $80 million on remaking The Wizard of Oz. Wow. So it is the original Wizard of Oz. It's not a new version. It's the original. And they're shortening it to 80 minutes. But it costs $80 million.

So you have to sell a lot of tickets to make up the $80 million. Now, the plan was they were going to build this first sphere in Las Vegas and then have satellite spheres in places like London. That didn't work. Plans for a sphere across the pond have dried up. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has rejected plans to build one in Stratford, saying it'll cause too much light pollution. So they've just sold their first satellite sphere in Abu Dhabi because the idea is you could take one of these movies

that you've spent $50 to $100 million producing and you have it in your sphere, but now you can sell it in another sphere. And then you can start making money. We would love to build in other places. And that is our plan is to build other spheres. Love to build one in New York. But the whole concept is based on multiple spheres. And the issue has been everyone can look at this and say, hmm, cost you $2.3 billion to make and you're not making money in Las Vegas.

Why would I do that? So Abu Dhabi has stepped forward, but they have been it. Getting back to the concerts for a second here, it feels like it's the concerts that are really going to excite people. That's true. People travel to Las Vegas to see Adele, to see Katy Perry, to see Bruno Mars and Anderson. They don't travel to Las Vegas to watch a depressing nature documentary. Sorry to keep harping on Darren Aronofsky's poor movie.

He's an artist, Sean. He's an artist. I keep forgetting that. For a while there, the Sphere was in talks to host Beyoncé. This is the kind of big-t ticket item that would bring people to Vegas for, who knows, a year, two years, over and over again to see Queen B. And then it fell apart. And instead, you've got these like boomer acts over and over. No disrespect. Love some Eagles songs.

Make it easy. disrespect, love some Eagles songs. Is it not working out for Jimmy Dolan to attract younger artists? Well, it's an issue. So it depends on who you speak to why this is happening. Beyonce was clearly in talks. We reported at the New York Post that Beyonce wanted at least a few weeks of rehearsal time. But she's Queen B. She wants those few weeks, and she's going to want them when she wants them. Well, Dolan has three to four movies showing a day. He wants that money. So he did not give her the couple weeks of rehearsal time she wanted because that would

have meant lost revenue for Jimmy Dolan. There are people you speak to around this who are concerned about that. You want this fear to be hip, to attract a younger audience, and it hasn't really happened. One of the challenges is it is a roughly 18,000-seat arena, so you need an artist that will at least come close to packing that arena. That does limit you.

There are plenty of interesting artists that can pack a 10,000-seat arena. And not only does it need an act that can pack an 18,000-seat arena, because you have to create a special performance for this space, and that takes money and time and effort. You need an artist who's willing to come there for two or three months, at least, or longer. Is there a third option here that we haven't discussed?

Is there something other than Beyonce or, let's say, some super successful custom movie that they run on the nights they don't have shows that could keep this place not only, you know, around, but thriving. Well, they were hoping to have conferences there during the day, which would raise some money. Oh, gosh, that sounds so boring. I'm sorry. Well, you and I might find it boring, but I'm sure you could put on quite a presentation. We built this legendary venue that you could see from space. Anyway, here's a PowerPoint. Here's IBM. So that is one way to generate money. They were hoping certainly for a sponsor. They don't have a sponsor. So they were hoping by this point you would have Federal Express's The Sphere or whoever it would be. They're looking for a price that is similar to a top sports arena in the country.

They haven't found it. What they have been able to sell is ads on the exosphere, the outside of the sphere. The financial performance of the sphere, they lost in the quarter ending September 30th, they lost $117 million. That can only happen for so long. The sphere was promised to us as the future of entertainment. And I know we've been laughing a little bit here,

but that sounds pretty cool. And when I've seen the thing in person, which I have a few times, it looks pretty cool. And when I see people experiencing it, they seem to be having a great time. I have a friend who goes to a lot of shows, and he went and he said it was the greatest thing he's ever seen, fish at the sphere. But does this feel like the future of entertainment? Or does this feel like IMAX,

ultimately, which is like a thing people do sometimes when they feel like it, but it hasn't really become the standard, even though it's great? Well, that's a great question, Sean. And I think we're at an inflection point. And I think what makes the sphere such an interesting story is that on the one hand, it's worked. You know, like your friend said, that Phish concert was the most amazing concert he said he's ever seen, and it's Phish. I shouldn't say that. So it's kind of this dilemma

that I think Dolan is facing right now of I have this amazing arena, I have this amazing arena, I have this amazing facility, but I don't know how to make it, forget profitable, I don't know how to even make it viable. You know, a typical arena of 18,000 people, you could throw sports teams in there. You can't have sports teams here. The UFC held an event there that they say they generated 22 million in revenue so it was a success but they also say they'll never come back. You know they've said that publicly so obviously it wasn't too much of a success. So do I think it has a chance? Yes because it is an amazing facility. But if you look at the stock price, you look at the market cap, it's less than $2.3 billion, significantly less.

Market investors are telling you this is a failure. Yet, it is really iconic. Now, if you think of Las Vegas and you say, okay, give me knee-jerk reaction. Give me three iconic things in Las Vegas, three iconic venues. This is probably one of them. Yeah. I love a mixed bag. Yeah, this is an interesting mixed bag. And how Dolan pivots will be a really interesting question. Josh Kosman, New York Post, Pura Vida.

Thanks to Annie Phillips and Cameron Laws for their help with today's show, which was produced by Amanda Llewellyn, who had a pretty good time at the Sphere when she went this year with her dad. Amanda was edited by Amin Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Andrea Christen's daughter and Patrick Boyd. This was Today Explained.