Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour: reliable video delivery and flexible content control

After 225 shows - including a historic Glastonbury appearance and a record-breaking 10-day Wembley residency, along with its fair share of headlines - Coldplay's Music of the Spheres World tour has become a global phenomenon.

Spanning three-and-a-half years and six continents, each show has delivered exactly what fans have come to expect: a joyful, multisensory spectacle with spontaneous setlists, inflatable video screens, special effects, and more. Bringing all the visuals required for a tour of this scale to life, however, wasn’t easy.

To make it happen, Screens Director and Creative Associate Joshua Koffman used Disguise GX 3 and GX 2C media servers, along with Designer software, to visualise, control and deliver the video content throughout the epic tour. 

The Challenge

The tour took a unique approach to LED, using a number of unusual screens which would require a robust and reliable toolkit. With two 14-metre circular IMAG screens on either side of the stage, a central semicircular ‘moonrise’ screen, four inflatable spherical screens, B-stage flooring LED, and a vast mesh backdrop, there was a lot of video content for Koffman and his team to control, and everything needed to sync perfectly with other elements such as special effects and lighting.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for the video crew on Music of the Spheres was swapping out the visuals at a moment’s notice for the band’s ever-changing setlists. With 10 studio albums since 2000, Coldplay has amassed a large back catalogue, and fans all come to the show hoping to hear their favourites. The band likes to lean into this and regularly revisit older tracks, switching things up on a nightly basis. It’s a treat for concertgoers, and keeps things interesting for Koffman and his team.

“I’ve done tours where the setlist was fixed from day one and never changed. Here, even after several years, it’s rare that we play the same setlist two nights in a row,” Koffman explains. “That means we have to be ready for anything. We don’t get the setlist until just before the band goes on. By then, it’s too late to invent new content. Early in the process, Video Designer Leo Flint worked with various content houses to tailor new and existing visuals to the current touring setup. But we needed to be able to access them all in an efficient manner.”

Having a solution that would give them the flexibility to make quick content changes with ease would prove to be crucial.

The Solution

The storage capabilities of Disguise Designer enabled Koffman to keep all of Coldplay’s visuals from the entire tour in one large show file. That way, if the band decided to play a song for the first time in a year or more, he only needed to run through it once on his editor at Front of House before sending it out live.

“Designer makes this approach manageable,” says Koffman. “My show file always has all the songs, even ones we only played once three years ago. I’m not penalized for keeping them, and performance doesn’t suffer. And since I always have an editor online, I can check and adjust things ahead of time, so we’re not discovering problems live. Honestly, I’d find it very tricky to run this show without those Designer capabilities.”

In terms of standout visual moments, the show has many. A favourite of Koffman’s is The Scientist Reversed, a stylised version of the song based on playing both the track, and the IMAG recording of the band and the crowd, backwards. “It involved some clever programming in Disguise, some clever interface stuff that Owen my server engineer did”, Koffman explains. “We ramp that IMAG backwards so that at the end of the reverse, we have completely backed through everything that we just saw live.” With changing tempos and a different outcome every night, it’s a unique moment, driven by impressive video control.

Supplied by PRG, the show runs on one GX 3 server, which acts as the director, along with six GX 2Cs. With Notch graphics used in a number of tracks, the GX range was the obvious choice for a tour of this scale to manage the vast amount of video content across multiple screens, and run reliably every night.

The Results

Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour has been a global success, selling more than 12 million tickets and becoming the most-attended concert tour in history. It shows no signs of slowing down either, as the band recently announced even more shows for 2027. Koffman and the entire video crew have helped to deliver this success by creating a multicoloured spectacle in venues all over the world, enabling the band to surprise concertgoers with old and new favourites alike. The result: a record-breaking, history-making live show, and lasting memories for fans.