Inside Apple’s New London Music Hall at Battersea Power Station

LONDON — Apple Inc. has opened Apple Music Hall, a custom-built concert and broadcast facility inside its UK headquarters at the historic Battersea Power Station. The venue accommodates up to 600 people in standing and seated configurations, with a 38-foot-wide stage that can be arranged for front-facing concerts or performances in-the-round.

Apple’s London headquarters officially opened inside the restored power station in early 2023. The company occupies approximately 500,000 square feet across six floors of the former boiler house, representing roughly 40 percent of the historic development and bringing together approximately 3,000 employees previously spread across offices in London.

The hall’s interior reflects the Grade II* listed building’s industrial heritage through heritage brickwork, fluted arches, bronze balconies, and a large glass wall. Its dressing rooms provide performing artists and their crews with direct views over the retail and dining concourses of the wider Battersea development.

Apple Music Hall includes a 48-speaker Spatial audio system integrated with Dolby Atmos, along with 16 camera mounting locations. A dedicated broadcast control room supports video capture from iPhones as well as other professional camera systems, allowing Apple to manage live-performance production and distribution from its own corporate real estate.

Two dedicated recording and mixing studios support the venue’s broadcast operations. Engineers can use them to capture multitrack recordings and mix them in Spatial Audio either during a live broadcast or in post-production. Apple is positioning the facility to bypass traditional third-party recording and broadcast venues and control its live-performance catalog from the physical stage through to digital streams delivered to millions of subscribers worldwide.

The venue will serve as a primary production engine for “Apple Music Live,” the concert streaming series Apple launched in May 2022. Previous performers have included Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, Alicia Keys, Ed Sheeran, and SZA.

Apple introduced Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos to its music streaming service in June 2021 at no additional cost to subscribers. The format is supported by premium audio products including AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and HomePod speakers, which are engineered to decode and play Spatial Audio.

“Today, with the opening of Apple Music Hall, we are once again taking an unprecedented step further in our commitment to artists and fans by supporting live music in ways only Apple can do,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s Vice President of Apple Music and International Content.

Schusser also described the facility as a turnkey, “plug-and-play” environment for independent and up-and-coming musicians. Although the hall is designed for high-profile broadcasts, artists can use one visit to complete several promotional tasks. “You can come in, do an interview, get your photography and social media done, play a show, broadcast worldwide, and get a high-quality Spatial Audio recording out of it,” Schusser said in an interview with design publication *Wallpaper*. “That’s a phenomenal setup for artists to do great work.”

Battersea Power Station was designed in the 1930s by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed the UK’s iconic red telephone box. The coal-fired station once supplied a fifth of London’s electricity before it was decommissioned in 1983 and left derelict for nearly four decades.

A multi-billion-pound redevelopment backed by a consortium of Malaysian investors turned the site into a mixed-use neighborhood with residential apartments, offices, shops, restaurants, and entertainment spaces. The development officially opened to the public in October 2022.