As the chords in “Sigma Oasis” reverberated last Saturday night, it felt to 17,600 Phish fans like they were inside an egg. The shell cracked, and they were birds hatching and taking flight.
They were at the Sphere in Las Vegas, or “Sphere,” as fans and its owner call it.
The venue that created a new type of live entertainment has become the highest-grossing arena in the world, with $379 million on 1.7 million tickets sold last year, according to Pollstar.
When it opened three years ago, it had all the signs of an impending disaster.
Sphere was completed in 2023 for $2.3 billion, or nearly $1 billion over budget and years behind schedule. It was the brainchild of James Dolan, who was perpetually in the klieg lights for his sports and entertainment empire that controlled the Knicks, Rangers and Madison Square Garden.
Today, Sphere Entertainment Co. is bringing Sphere to Abu Dhabi and a second U.S. location with a smaller, 6,000-seat Sphere planned for the National Harbor in Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Executives are surveying other cities for more locations. Dolan has said publicly the company could manage five or six projects at a time, and he wants to pursue “basically as many as we can.”
Sphere has discovered an unexpected hit formula: the performance space that is the most cutting-edge technically works with bands, whose frontmen are old enough to have decades of greatest hits that everyone knows by heart. And it can fill the arena with fans the age of its stars—U2’s Bono (65)—as well as vintage-curious Gen Z.
It stacks the calendar with established artists for residencies that can last days, weeks or months—pairing safe, broadly appealing musical acts with spectacular visual flair in shows that take months to produce. U2, Eagles, Kenny Chesney and Backstreet Boys, among others. During the day before a concert, it can charge $200 a ticket for “The Wizard of Oz,” remastered so audiences feel like they’re walking with Dorothy on the yellow brick road.
Sphere started in 2016 with a rough drawing Dolan sketched of a circle with a person inside. He tasked his executive team with bringing it to life.
Construction began in 2018 with a budget of $1.2 billion. Midway through, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and casinos on the Strip closed, locking their doors for the first time ever. Construction on Sphere stopped and the future of live entertainment venues was in doubt.
During construction, executives and observers struggled to describe it. Rolling Stone called it an “insane concert venue.” One executive told the magazine it would be a “planetarium times 10.”
Questions lingered: Would artists be willing to pay millions of dollars required for a high-tech Sphere concert production and ask fans to trek to the desert to see it? And would the spectacle of the venue eclipse the human stars?
The company knew it needed a globally known artist to kick things off. It was U2, a nearly 50-year-old Irish rock band long known for its embrace of high-tech shows. The band agreed to be the opening act before Sphere was completed.
U2’s Sphere residency was a hit when it opened in September 2023 and would run for 40 shows.Many of the residencies that followed leaned on nostalgia and audiences old enough to afford to make the trip: Phish and Dead & Co., Eagles, Backstreet Boys and, coming this year, No Doubt, Metallica and Carín León. The company is also looking to develop more immersive experiences, similar to “The Wizard of Oz.”
“We’re still scratching the surface,” said Josephine Vaccarello, executive vice president of live for Sphere Entertainment and MSG Entertainment. “Every act that comes in there—and I love this—everyone tries to one-up the last act.”
Baz Halpin, CEO and founder of production company Silent House, designed and produced Sphere shows for the Eagles and Backstreet Boys. The Eagles are a pretty stationary rock band, while Backstreet Boys have dances and costume changes, making the connection to what was happening on the screen even more important, he said.
Halpin had the idea of having Backstreet Boys fly up into the air on a lift to make it feel similar to an amusement-park ride. They matched the speed of the lift with the speed of the visuals to make it feel like “they’re flying through this space station,” he said.
Phish offered a journey through trippy, fever dream animations paired with their songs. The Zac Brown Band brought fans through an underwater underworld as Brown told his life story.
For “The Wizard of Oz,” Dolan decided he wanted to turn the 1939 classic film into an immersive experience. He recruited Google’s AI engineers for the $100 million project. “When we first brought the project to Google and we talked to their scientists, I think they thought we were a little crazy,” Dolan said in an interview last year. Red apples made of foam drop from above in one scene, and leaves swirl during the tornado.
From its opening Aug. 28 through Jan. 20, the movie generated more than $260 million in ticket sales, the company said.
The biggest music stars and the showiest productions are enjoying broad popularity right now. Taylor Swift’s Eras tour changed economies in cities around the world as she filled stadiums and proved fans would get on a plane for a concert. Sphere works for artists who have done their time on the road and are game to set up shop for a while. They need to stay to amortize the cost of producing a show.
After a loss, Sphere Entertainment inched into profitability last year with net income of $33.4 million, compared with a net loss of $325 million the prior year. Its share price skyrocketed 79% to $129 from $26 in April 2025.
Tickets to Sphere concerts can range for a few hundred dollars to thousands. The average resale ticket price on SeatGeek so far this year is $521, according to the resale platform that also offers primary ticketing. That’s up from $415 last year. Phish has garnered among the highest resale prices at $798, followed by U2 for $754 and Eagles for $639, according to the company.
Illenium, a star in electronic dance music, recorded an album with his Sphere residency in mind, crafting the songs to match the visual plan. “Being able to build that world not only musically, but also visually at the same time and in parallel, is something that we just had never done before,” said Mike Bedard, a manager for Illenium.
Jeff Stein, a musician and lawyer in San Francisco, has seen movies “Postcard from Earth” and “The Wizard of Oz” on trips to Vegas. When his favorite band, Metallica, announced a Sphere residency starting this October, with help of a friend in a fan club, he snagged tickets for two nights for $630. The band has announced 24 shows at the venue, all sold out.
“You remember when IMAX became a thing, and they had the [3-D] glasses, and it didn’t quite meet expectations?” said the 42-year-old Stein. “I feel like the Sphere is what that should have been.”
Write to Katherine Sayre at katherine.sayre@wsj.com
