The imposing Sphere in Las Vegas might soon have a little sibling on the East Coast. The company behind it has announced its intent to build a similar venue at National Harbor in the Washington DC metropolitan area.
This is venture capital insanity at its finest.
For those who don’t know, the Sphere is one of the most unprofitable ventures ever devised. And this isn’t “They’re losing money now but eventually they’ll be profitable.” There’s no way for this to ever be profitable.
The problem is simple; everything shown at the Sphere - including concerts, because the expectation is that those will have custom graphics - has to be custom made for the Sphere. And that’s expensive. It’s like running a movie studio that makes their own movies, only shows them at one cinema with one screen in one town, can’t sell them online or rent them or anything else, and expecting to make money. How? Would you expect to make money like that?
There’s no realistic price they can charge that will land between “People will pay this” and “They’re profitable.” The overlap between those numbers doesn’t exist.
Concerts are actually even worse for them than movies, because the artist takes most of the door price, so they still have to do custom visuals, but their margins are squeezed even tighter.
