The round
Unit1, a British music technology company, has raised just under £15m — $20m — to stage concerts fronted by what it calls hyper-realistic digital avatars of musicians, the Guardian reported on Sunday.
The round was led by Balderton Capital through partner Daniel Waterhouse, an early investor in Spotify, and joined by existing backers including the venture firm Mercuri and Paul McGuinness, the Irish music executive who managed U2 from the late 1970s until 2013.
Unit1 was set up last year by Barney Wragg, who ran Andrew Lloyd Webber’s entertainment group for five years from late 2011.
What it is building
The company wants to put on shows fronted by avatars of living artists who no longer tour, and by recreations of performances by musicians who have died. For the second case, it says it will build the avatar from archive footage combined with footage of hired actors and musicians who either look or play like the artist, blended together.
Unit1 has tested the approach with the Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall, who worked with Wragg during a stint at EMI. She was filmed by motion capture cameras in a London studio recreating a two-decade-old performance on Later… with Jools Holland, with the avatar updating her features to how she looks now.
The shows are meant to put real musicians playing live instruments on stage alongside the digital performers, with the audience watching a high-definition LED screen combined with lights, sound and props. “For the audience member in the room it is seamless between the digital and the physical room, immersing them,” Wragg told the Guardian. “It’s a teleportation of an audience member to a time and place.”
Why it is not Abba Voyage
The reference point for this business is Abba Voyage, the avatar concert that opened in east London in 2022 and runs in a venue built for it. Unit1’s pitch is a version that costs less to produce and does not need a dedicated building, which would let a show run in several countries at once. The new money goes into research and development and into securing intellectual property and licensing deals with artists and their estates.
The idea is older than the current wave of generative models — a hologram of Tupac Shakur appeared alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre at Coachella in 2012 — but the economics change when the likeness can be produced without a purpose-built show.
The part audiences object to
Digitally resurrecting dead performers is the contested half of the proposition. A plan earlier this year for a lifesize AI-powered avatar of the Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne was criticised by some fans as disrespectful and in poor taste.
Wragg said Unit1 is in most cases “dealing with family members of estates to create something which is well documented and understood — extremely well-known concerts or live recordings”, adding: “We are mindful that you do not want to be distasteful.” He would not say which concerts the company might recreate, though he has previously named performances he wishes he had seen, among them Queen at Live Aid, the Beatles at the Cavern Club and Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock.
What to watch
The licensing is the thing to follow. Unit1 has money and a pilot; what it does not yet have in public is a named estate, a named venue or a date. The first announced show will say whether rights holders are willing to sign, and on what terms.
