On New Year’s Eve, Bruno Mars will open The Chelsea, a new, 40,000-square-foot performance space at The Cosmopolitan that holds just 3,200 people.
It is the latest of many performance spaces to open in Las Vegas, but it won’t be the last.
With The Chelsea, rebuilt from a previous stint as a ballroom, the resort is bringing arena-name performers to an intimate concert space, joining one of many venues in the city that books big-name performers, including the Boulevard Pool, an outdoor performance space at The Cosmopolitan. 
The star power drawn to Las Vegas’ arenas, lounges, nightclubs and permanent residency venues make it nearly impossible to go a single night without finding at least one performance or concert that would turn heads in other cities.
Even with so many venues, these spaces are not competing for the audience, but for the performers.
“In most cities, the idea that ‘if you build it, they will come’ isn’t true, but that seems to be the case in Las Vegas,” says Paul Beard, COO for The Smith Center, which primarily caters to local audiences with artistic and cultural performances in four venues.
Proof of the city’s ability to sustain so many performances is illustrated night after night in venue after venue. It is most obvious when Las Vegas hosts potentially competing events.
During the Electric Daisy Carnival, for example, more than 100,000 people make their way to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway for three nights of house and electronic music from world-renowned DJs.
Meanwhile, on the Strip, house music DJs like Avicii and Tiësto still spin to packed houses.
What might be considered a surfeit of venues in other cities does not result in oversaturation here. And while venues compete for performers, driving up their costs, ticket prices can be surprisingly inexpensive because there are so many options to choose from.
Given that, Beard says, the real question is how venues like The Chelsea make money. The answer is that in a resort like the Cosmopolitan, the crowds at The Chelsea are likely to drink, eat and gamble at the resort’s bars and lounges. The Chelsea itself was designed to encourage visitors to hang out before a performance as well as order a few drinks at its stylish cocktail lounge during the show – specially designed flasks are available at The Chelsea for this purpose.
For its part, representatives for The Cosmopolitan are hopeful that audiences and performers alike will appreciate the effort put into its new venue.
“We wanted to create an experience that our artists will love,” said the resort’s CMO, Lisa Marchese. “Seeing someone like Bruno Mars at a venue like this is going to be tremendous. To be in a venue with 3,200 people where the energy will reverberate is going to be something they enjoy and hopefully want to come back to.”