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.

Explore more

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

From the January 20th 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Angela Merkel in Frankfurt, Germany in December 1991

Angela Merkel sets out to restore her reputation

But her new memoir is unlikely to change her critics’ minds

Blue books forming a winner rosette on a red background

The best books of 2024, as chosen by The Economist

Readers will never think the same way again about games, horses and spies


Elon Musk speaks at the Milken Institute's Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

What to read to understand Elon Musk

The world’s richest man was shaped by science fiction


Tech and religion are very much alike

They both have gods, rich institutions and secretive cultures

Woodrow Wilson’s reputation continues to decline

A dispassionate new biography chronicles the former president’s hostility to suffrage

The cult of Jordan Peterson

What the Canadian intellectual gets right about young men