Culture | Live music

Does Las Vegas’s Sphere reveal the future of concerts?

The venue is dazzling. But copycats are unlikely to be built soon

U2 perform at the Sphere.
Photograph: Getty Images
|LAS VEGAS

Nestled between hotels and conference centres, a short walk from the Las Vegas strip, is a giant, wide-eyed emoji. Sometimes it is an enormous, hyperrealistic eyeball, a basketball or a whorl of flames. The Sphere, a remarkable new concert venue, is 366 feet (110 metres) tall and 516 wide; an LED screen spanning almost 600,000 square feet covers the exterior.

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This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Two-billion-dollar baby”

From the January 20th 2024 edition

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