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Lost Weekend’ In Space: How Artists Like Phoebe Bridgers Turn Planetariums Into Music Venues
“It’s like making a music video,” Andrew Bundas says. “There’s no one way to do it.” He’s speaking about an unusual but increasingly popular visual medium for musicians to promote their new music: planetarium shows. As planetarium educator for the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., Bundas has worked on two of the most high-profile examples in recent years: Lil Yachty’s album release events for his Let’s Start Here in 2023, and, last week, listening experiences celebrating Phoebe Bridgers’ Lost Weekend release. From Aug. 10-14, fans around the world packed into 44 planetariums — in such far-flung locales as Bozeman, Mont., Vancouver, Glasgow and Auckland — to listen to Lost Weekend while watching one of two different visual experiences Bridgers offered in partnership with Spotify: a planetarium dome show, with original photography by National Geographic ’s Babak Tafreshi, or a laser show. But on Aug. 13, the night before the Lost Weekend album release, Bridgers herself showed up to the Liberty Science Center’s Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium, speaking to the audience of fans and performing three tracks in the planetarium space. “That she came out the night of the release of the album to physically be in the planetarium, I think says a lot about how much she cared,” says Bundas. “It was really cool.”
Opened six years ago, the Liberty Science Center’s planetarium — which the center’s president and CEO Paul Hoffman notes is “the largest and most technologically advanced planetarium not just in the country but the whole Western Hemisphere” — offers particularly great visual potential to musicians. As Hoffman says, “in terms of resolution, it’s like watching the best HD TV, but on a screen more than 90 feet across.”
Artists of all sorts can take advantage of the capabilities of a planetarium — Hoffman and Bundas have worked with many cover bands, not just well-known stars like Bridgers and Yachty. But a show like Bridgers’, with custom astrophotography, or Yachty’s, with custom animation, can take “months and months and months of time” (astrophotography, for one thing, is very weather-dependent).
Following Bridgers’ Jersey City shows, Hoffman and Bundas spoke to Billboard about what they took to put on — and why more artists should see their local planetariums as an ideal music venue. How did your planetarium get into working with musicians? Paul Hoffman: Our day job is getting astronomy and space science across [to visitors] at a time when discoveries and public interest are peaking. The kinds of images we’re getting from both ground and space-based telescopes are incredible. But we have one of the most sophisticated technological systems, really immersive for the visitor. We all know the Sphere in Las Vegas, but the Sphere is not intimate; this is an intimate setting, it’s 400 people. So we thought it would be wonderful to work with artists — visual artists, musicians — because what they do could be expressed on this incredible canvas.
Andrew Bundas : A lot of people, when they think of what a planetarium is, it’s kind of an older style one where all we can do is look at the sky. But in the last five to ten years there’s been a huge increase in [sophistication of] the technology that’s in planetariums. We’re able to project 88 million pixels on the dome, 8K resolution powered by incredibly powerful graphics-generating computers — which really opens us up to working with artists and musicians and using the software we have to create amazing custom visuals.
Bridgers performed with Christian Lee Hutson at the Liberty Science Center’s Lost Weekend planetarium event on Oct. 13, 2026 (photo credit: Matt Grub).
Before Phoebe, what experience did you have working with musicians in the planetarium? Hoffman : We worked with Lil Yachty and his team, dropping his album. We’ve worked with cover bands — a Grateful Dead cover band, Strangers Stopping Strangers, used trippy space images and was fantastic. Bundas : I think they’ve played in the planetarium three times, and we made a lot of custom very cool slow-moving visuals to go along with their music. Hoffman : Planetariums can also do laser shows, and they’ve had a real comeback. It’s fun for the right kind of musicians – you’re [playing music to] images that are totally surrounding the audience, so it can add a freshness to an artist’s practice to do a full-dome experience like ours. What approach do artists take typically? Do they arrive with a finished product or look to you to help them realize the dome show? Bundas : Both, really. You can take almost any image and put it through the software that makes the dome experience. The best experience is to think about how you work with the fact that you’re surrounding your audience, and how can you take advantage of that? Hoffman: The way we work with people is all based on what they want to do. You can use existing images and work with them to create a show, or you can shoot original content. In Phoebe Bridgers’ case, she had [already] worked with a National Geographic photographer [Babak Tafreshi] and it’s absolutely incredible. She and her team had a conception and that’s what they realized on the dome — we didn’t create the images, but we’re completely capable of doing that. Bundas : Whenever we work with someone not really familiar, we really encourage them to make use of the entire space… helping the artist just figure out how they can use the space to draw someone’s eye around the front of the room, to the back and sides of them. They’re always very excited to have, in our case, a massive amount of real estate to work with on the screen. To your minds, is a planetarium particularly well-suited to a specific kind of music or artist? Hoffman: Look, they started back with Pink Floyd, classical orchestras have done stuff in planetariums — it’s just a different media. Is there music that’s suited to video? No. But it’...
BehindLiberty Science CenterBridgersIt’sAndrew BundasThere’sJersey CityN.JBundasLil Yachty’sLetStart Here
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