John Mayer says the Las Vegas Sphere has created “a live-music space race” for “big league” bands to put on the best show

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, the saying goes. The thought comes to mind when one looks at the Las Vegas Sphere and its 1.2 million LED puck-touting and 1,600 speaker-blasting glory.

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As the city’s most expensive entertainment venue ever built, the Sphere, since opening last year, has been graced by U2, Phish and most recently, the John Mayer-augmented Grateful Dead offshoot Dead & Company.

At the time of writing, the group — which pairs Mayer with Grateful Dead OGs Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, plus Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and Jay Lane — has completed over half of their 30-date summer residency at the dome-shaped venue.

Speaking to LA Times about the experience thus far, Mayer notes how the Sphere has “established overnight a new big league” of live bands who have the vision and the budget to fully take advantage of the venue’s unique immersive audio and visual capabilities.

“I think what we all love is that there’s finally once again a live-music space race,” he says. “There’s the social-media space race, the podcast space race, the AI [artificial intelligence] space race. But live music pretty much stayed the same for such a long time.”

According to the Gravity hitmaker, artists don’t perform at the Sphere to satisfy their ego — “Well, it’s a little ego,” Mayer concedes — as much as they do to “delight and surprise people more than they expected to be with this big, empty canvas and this really big palette.”

“I think this is the first time in a long time where we feel kind of honoured to be a part of something that’s so culturally right up in everyone’s view,” he adds. “We’re all sort of like, how cool is this?”

Check out the full list of Sphere dates at the Dead & Co. website.