Yes, Jennifer Lopez Should Do a Las Vegas Residency

Jenny from the Block may soon be Jenny on the Strip. TMZ reports that the flygirl-cum-actress-cum-diva was spotted over the weekend with her manager at Britney Spears’ Piece of Me show and Shania Twain’s Still the One performance — possibly doing research for her own iteration of the Vegas residency.

Though there’s no word yet from J.Lo herself, a stint in Sin City wouldn’t be an altogether surprising move at this stage in her career. Where a Las Vegas residency once spelled doom for fading musicians’ careers, today it’s a normal — not to mention enormously lucrative — gig in the rotation for megastars like Madonna, Elton John, and the ever-in-love Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. And while performers certainly skew middle-aged and older, Vegas dealmakers appear to be consciously appealing to younger crowds, opening up residencies to DJs like Deadmau5 and Tiesto. (Though Lopez is middle-aged herself at 45, her fan base tends to skew younger than that of the Dions and the Meatloafs and the Chers.)

A sojourn in Las Vegas spells a few things for an artist like J.Lo: stability, breathing room, and major cash. Residencies are essentially like a tour, minus the grueling travel schedule. They often consist of a handful of shows each week for four or five months, which would leave time for the other projects in Lopez’s multi-hyphenate career: judging American Idol, managing her lifestyle brand, and overseeing the foundation she started with her sister Lydia to improve health care access in under-served communities.

It would also allow Lopez some time to regroup from her 2014 album A.K.A., which disappointed with the lowest sales of her eight studio albums, selling just 60,000 copies in the U.S. She could — and likely would — return to some of the more crowd-pleasing hits from her earlier career as she mulls over where to go next.

And if none of these reasons is enough, then the six-figure nightly intake stands a solid chance at sealing the deal. Even after a tumultuous decade for Britney Spears and a rough run with her most recent album, Britney Jean, the onetime chart-topper is now raking in more than $300,000 per show, on track to gross more than $30 million over two years. Her love may not cost a thing, but J. Lo’s turn on the Vegas stage most certainly would.