VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: The Strip is Where Old Music Acts Go to Die

Music fans younger than 30 don’t imagine this way. They fold to regard Katy Perry, noblewoman Gaga, and Giordano Bruno Mars — those who put up afford $500 per just the ticket on the secondary market, anyway — with no more knowledge of the taint that a Las Vegas abidance once conferred on medicine careers.

But millennials and Gen-Xers think Las Vegas inward the ’90s and still mistakenly, often lazily, apply the obsolete stereotype. As of late as 2018, veritable millennial spokesperson Justin Timberlake told a wireless interviewer he would not execute a Las Vegas residency, comparing the notion to “planning your retirement.”

To be fair, that point out seemed less the like an nonsubjective assessment of what Las Vegas as a medicine town had get by so and more the likes of a personal jab on his ex-girlfriend. (Britney Spears, who last-place scored a Top 10 run into in 2011, performed a abidance at Planet Hollywood from 2013 to 2017.)

But still…

A Last Resort

Yes, Las Vegas was erst really a great deal a graveyard for music careers. Photos of the Strip from the ’70s through and through ’90s present marquees boasting the pinch options for concerts as the Osmonds, Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, Charo, Andy Williams, and other artists performing long beyond their ethnical expiration dates.

And non to pick on Duke Wayne Newton, but “Mr. Las Vegas” earned that form of address in the ’60s because, backwards then, there wasn’t much contention for it. While Vegas had headliners who were to a greater extent famous (i.e., the Rat Pack, Barbra Streisand, and Elvis Presley), Newton, who only if scored Phoebe Top 10 songs during a hitmaking life history that ended in 1972, was to a greater extent prominent because he lived inward town instead of quick plump for rest home after gigs. This allowed him to execute on weeknights and to come along all over Las Vegas on cherry-red carpets and at civic events.

So how did it all grow around for the Vegas residency? Thank Celine Dion. While the vocaliser was allay among the to the highest degree successful touring tonic stars inwards the human race inward 2003, she and her producers decided to get hold of a gamble.

But it was less of a chance than it seemed. They knew they were bringing something a great deal to a greater extent to the Vegas stage than just now another greatest-hits residency. “A New Day” was its own archetype theatrical event. Created for a reported $108M past director Francisco Franco Dragone, one of the Florida key architects of Cirque du Soleil’s style, the monumental production featured Dion fast over the audience in draw rein rigging, Dion ascending to the rafters on a footstall as a drapery of irrigate rained down pat(p) around her, and Frank Sinatra dropping inward for a duo on the vocal “All the Way” via a $10M hi-def screen out (the continent’s largest at the time).

“Back inward 2001 or 2002, when we started mentation virtually this thought … Las Vegas was pretty sleepy-eyed when it came to entertainment,” St. John Nelson, senior VP of the residency’s promoter, Concerts West, told Billboard powder store inward 2019. “You had Cirque du Soleil and the stuff and nonsense the Rat Pack and Elvis Presley had done in the past, but nil had really been sledding on for headliners. It was sort of a property you went on the downside of your life history and it took a patch for that to change.”

A ‘New Day’ for Vegas Residencies

Part of the intellect for Dion’s success was timing. Up until the ’90s, music acts were seen as an afterthought by the resorts that hired them — a bonus thrown and twisted inward for the gamblers, who brought inwards 75% of the middling resort’s revenue.

In the young millennium, when the Amphitheatrum Flavium was under construction, gaming began to make up off often less. Today, it generates only if well-nigh 25% of casino revenue. So, Strip resorts decided to divest themselves from demo business, leasing out their showrooms to main(a) producers who knew the business organization better.

“That was our opportunity,” Concerts West’s John Meglen told Billboard in 2019. “Everybody thought we were crazy, but we proved that it worked. Everybody that workings inwards that building had worked for us — ticket-takers, security, stagehands.”

Dion’s 17-year, two-residency run, which grossed $681M over 1,113 shows and was seen past more than 4.5 jillion fans, paved the way of life for noblewoman Gaga, piece launching her “Enigma + Jazz & Piano” residence at the height of her career inwards 2018, to hold with nought irony or shame: “It’s been my lifelong dream to follow a Las Vegas girl.”

As for Justin Timberlake, he’d amend modification his air and launch a Vegas abidance soon. The lastly Top 10 collide with he had was back inward 2016, and Vegas doesn’t perform many nostalgia residencies anymore.

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