U2 frontman Bono moves in mysterious ways — or, as Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino may put it, walks to the beat of his own drum.
That’s because Rapino, during a panel conversation at Bloomberg Screentime in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, said he tried to dissuade the singer and his band from opening the Sphere in Las Vegas last year. Bono, Rapino said, couldn’t be dissuaded.
“That was fully Bono — I tried to talk him out of it,” Rapino said. “I was worried about it. He was determined to do it.”
Rapino said he shared with Bono a fear he’d discussed with one of his friends: what if the new, 18,600-seat auditorium and its innovative wraparound LED screens was so trippy that fans started to throw up?
Again, Bono wasn’t worried about it, telling Rapino he has “got a guy who’s going to look at it.”
Everything apparently checked out with Bono and his nameless tech guru, because U2 did indeed open Sphere on Sept. 29, 2023.
“I was worried. Bono is a force of nature, he said let’s go for it,” Rapino said. “We sat there opening night, [and] it was fabulous.”
The band ended up playing 40 shows between September and March 2024 at the venue, which is run by MSG head honcho James Dolan.
A little earlier, moderator Lucas Shaw asked Rapino if he thought Sphere would ever make back its money. (The arena cost $2.3 billion to make; Sphere Entertainment Co. executives said the venue generated $497 million in sales for the fiscal year that ended at the end of June.)
“[Dolan] took a big swing, it’s innovative as hell. I’m sure the costs versus the revenue part, he’ll figure out over time. I give him full credit — artists love the idea of it,” Rapino said.
He added: “I don’t know if the business model is right, I don’t know if the business model is replicable, [and] I don’t know if it works for Vegas, which is a unicorn.”
The conversation between Shaw and Rapino also touched on the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment.
In May the DOJ, along with 30 state and district attorneys general, filed a lawsuit against LNE and Ticketmaster, its subsidiary since the two merged in 2010. The lawsuit claimed the combo have a monopoly on live events that harms fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators.
“The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in May. “It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
Rapino said on Wednesday he believes LNE will ultimately win the case and remain intact.
“At the end of the day, everyone thinks they’re innocent. We believe we built a great business,” he said. “We’re a 2% margin business, so we must be the dumbest monopoly alive.”
Rapino added: “Are we vertical? Of course we’re vertical. Every promoter from history has been vertical, because that’s how you pay the bills when you’re a 2% margin [business].”
Shaw lightly pushed back on the 2% margin claim, saying that’s for the company’s promotion business, while its margins on ticket prices are better.
Live Nation controls more than 265 concert venues in North America and manages more than 400 artists.