“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’s not a trivial exercise. You really want to create an experience that works in an intimate dome space, [so] you or your team or we need to invest time and energy in doing that. Bundas: We’ve seen a lot of different kinds of music in the planetarium, and it really is just crafting the visuals to fit the feeling of the music. Historically things like laser shows have skewed more toward psychedelic rock but we’ve run a huge range of laser shows from metal to pop, all over the place. It’s really just crafting the visuals to fit whatever the vibe or intention of the music is.
Fans assembled for Bridgers’ Lost Weekend planetarium show at the Liberty Science Center (photo courtesy of Liberty Science Center).Since Phoebe came in with her own visuals made, can you tell me what your work with her and her team was like?Hoffman: Where we worked a lot with her team was on the physical look of our whole space. It’s “sad girl blue.” We were able to light our tower, so the whole place was lit up, there were smoke machines. She did all the images, totally original photography, and it was beautiful nature and astro photography — brilliant. Bundas: The planetarium show was very, very carefully crafted to match the feeling of the album. Hoffman: It wasn’t just a backdrop to [the music].How different an experience was it from the one with Lil Yachty? Hoffman: It’s obviously a different audience. Drake dropped by [Yachty’s show] unexpectedly. So when you have one of the most famous people in the world drop in, that’s a whole different thing. [Laughs.] Bundas: I think the two shows show the two sides of what I think works really well in a planetarium. Phoebe Bridgers was a lot more slowly moving night skies, aurora, and Lil Yachty’s show, there was some of that style of visuals as well but it was a lot more fast paced, more movement — one thing you can do really well here is give the feeling you’re moving in a space, flying forward, and Lil Yachty’s show leaned more into that. But as far as the experiences working with the artists and their teams, it was clear from the beginning with both that they cared deeply about making it an experience well-crafted for the planetarium.What advice would you give an artist who’s interested in exploring doing a planetarium show? Bundas: Reach out to a planetarium that is local to you — all the planetariums I talk to in the community love working with as many people as possible who want to show their work or create new work. For us, certainly for anyone on the east coast really, we’d love to work with them to bring their creative vision to life. In some cases that’s us recommending some animators who are well versed in the field and can create really amazing 3D digital art; sometimes It’s us connecting them with photographers or videographers with some familiarity in the space.Just come to some regular planetarium shows too, to see what it feels like to be in that space. We saw some reactions from guests who went to Phoebe Bridgers’ parties this week — their minds are blown as soon as they walk in. What did you two think of Lost Weekend itself? Hoffman: I liked how emotional it is. I found it quite stirring. I’m not the intended demographic for it obviously, but it was just a beautiful experience to be there among 400 people, most of whom were her most hardcore fans. It had a gentleness to it. Bundas: It’s hard for me to separate the album from listening to it in the planetarium, but it’s this almost meditative experience. As an astronomer primarily, the album gives me a very similar feeling to when I’m camping, looking out at the sky on a really clear night. It makes you think. Hearing the feedback from fans after shows, they were mentioning, “How are we gonna go back to life now after experiencing that?” It was so transcendent.
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