50,000 screaming fans is nothing in the mega concert era
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Any ordinary pop star can play a stadium. In August, Adele had a stadium built just for her.
At “Adele World," her 800,000-square-foot theme park in Munich, performers roamed the grounds on stilts. There was a Bavarian beer garden, a Ferris wheel and, of course, a music venue—a pop-up stadium that featured a 45,000-square-foot LED wall. It’s hard to wow anyone these days, but Adele’s 73,000-capacity, custom-built temporary venue, which reportedly cost $100 million, stunned the music business.
After just 10 shows, watched by over 730,000 fans, it was packed up and stuffed in a warehouse. “Adele could be the beginning of something," says Kirk Sommer, senior partner and global co-head of music at William Morris Endeavor, who represents Adele along with the Killers, Billie Eilish and Sam Smith. When a concert experience is one-of-a-kind, he says, it naturally whips up intense demand.
“I definitely think we’ll see more of these ‘event-ized’ shows." The concert business is going big—with over-the-top productions becoming the new normal for many of music’s elite acts. This year, Sphere, the new $2 billion venue in Las Vegas, hosted residencies-on-steroids by U2, Phish, Dead & Company and the Eagles, deploying an immersive 160,000-square-foot interior video screen. A second Sphere, in Abu Dhabi, is in the cards.
This May, Madonna gave a free show in Rio de Janeiro for an estimated 1.6 million fans—“the largest concert ever for a stand-alone show from any artist," according to her promoter, Live Nation Entertainment. The Weeknd, Travis Scott, George Strait and the Rolling Stones have all done massive shows in recent years. Then there’s Taylor Swift’s mania-inducing Eras Tour.
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