Concerts built around digital avatars of dead or de-aged performers are becoming technically convincing. The steady beneficiaries are the estates, rights holders and studios that build and license the systems, rather than the audiences who buy tickets.
Key takeaways
- Avatar concerts turn a performer’s likeness into a licensable asset that can be scheduled indefinitely, which is a fundamentally different business from touring a living musician.
- The Guardian reports that one avatar concert producer describes simulating effects as fine as tear evaporation between blinks and blood flow beneath the skin, indicating a capital-intensive production model.
- A deceased performer cannot consent to, refuse or renegotiate a given show, so editorial control sits entirely with whoever holds the rights to the name, likeness and recordings.
- The clearest counter-argument is access: a digital production can bring repertoire and performance styles to audiences who had no possibility of seeing the original artist.
The argument: the value created flows to rights holders, not to audiences
The phrase “zombie concert” is doing a lot of work in the current debate, and it obscures a simpler point. What is being built is not a resurrection but a product: a controlled, repeatable stage show assembled from archival recordings, motion capture, animation and rendering, presented in a venue designed around it or in a touring rig.
That product has an owner. Rights in a performer’s name, image, likeness and sound recordings are held by estates, labels, publishers and licensing companies. Building an avatar show requires clearing those rights, which means the people who control them set the terms — what the figure performs, how it looks, how often it appears, and what it is placed next to commercially. The audience buys a ticket; the technology firm books a production fee or a share; the rights holder monetises an asset that would otherwise generate income only through catalogue streaming and licensing.
This is not a moral claim about greed. It is a structural observation. When a living artist tours, the artist is physically present, can refuse a booking, can change the set list, can walk away from a promoter and carries the leverage that comes with being irreplaceable on the night. Strip the person out and every one of those frictions disappears. What remains is intellectual property, and intellectual property reliably rewards whoever holds the paperwork.
The claim to test, then, is not whether avatar concerts are convincing. It is whether the gains they create are broadly shared or concentrated. The evidence available points to concentration.
The technical ambition described by producers implies an industrial cost base
The Guardian’s report on avatar concerts quotes the chief executive of a studio producing them describing the level of detail now being attempted: using artificial intelligence to simulate how tears evaporate in the eye between blinks, and how blood moves beneath the skin so that areas of a digital character’s face shift colour when it laughs, opens its mouth or smiles.
Take that description at face value and consider what it implies about who can participate. Simulating subsurface blood flow and tear films is not a plug-in. It requires research staff, rendering infrastructure, reference capture, animation supervision and long iteration cycles before a single ticket is sold. Costs of that shape are recovered by long runs, by fixed venues rather than one-night stands, and by repeating the production across markets.
That economic structure selects for a particular kind of subject. It favours performers with global name recognition, deep catalogues and organised estates, because only those can plausibly fill a purpose-built room night after night for years. It does not favour the obscure, the regionally loved or the recently dead without an institutional apparatus behind them. The technology does not democratise access to the past; it industrialises the most bankable parts of it.
It also means the technology supplier is a durable winner regardless of which artist is chosen. A studio that can render convincing human skin can render anyone. Its asset is the pipeline, and the pipeline outlives any individual show.
A digital performer cannot object, and that changes who decides
The defining feature of a posthumous avatar show is the absence of the one person whose judgement traditionally governs a performance. Living artists routinely refuse things: a sponsor, a venue, a song they have grown to dislike, a political event, an arrangement they consider a misrepresentation. Those refusals are a form of authorship exercised continuously across a career.
A digital reconstruction has no such capacity. Every decision that the artist would once have made — repertoire, staging, costume, tone, commercial association — is made by someone else, and the reasonable assumption is that it is made by whoever paid for the rights. Estates may act with care, and some are run by people with direct knowledge of the artist’s wishes. But care is a matter of disposition, not of structure, and dispositions change when estates are sold, inherited or administered by third parties.
This matters for the question of winners because it settles the question of control. Audiences may assume they are watching something the artist would have endorsed. There is no mechanism by which that assumption can be tested. The show is an interpretation presented with the authority of a likeness, and the interpretation belongs to the owner.
It is not publicly known, in the general case, how revenue from such productions is divided between estates, technology suppliers, promoters and venues, or what proportion reaches session musicians, backing singers and other collaborators who contributed to the original recordings. Those terms are commercial and are not routinely disclosed.
A repeatable show behaves like a licence, not like a concert
Live music economics are built around scarcity and risk. A tour has a finite number of dates because a human being can only play so many. Illness cancels shows. Voices age. Performers retire, fall out with one another or die, and the market prices that fragility in — part of what a ticket buys is the knowledge that this particular night cannot be repeated.
An avatar production inverts every one of those properties. It does not age, does not lose its voice, does not cancel and does not need to be renegotiated after a bad review. It can run twice in an evening. It can be duplicated in another city while the first version continues. The marginal cost of an additional performance falls towards the cost of operating the venue.
Assets with those characteristics are valued like licences rather than like tours. That is precisely why they attract investment, and it is also why the surplus tends not to reach the audience: predictable supply removes the scarcity that would otherwise give buyers leverage, while the underlying rights remain scarce and tightly held. The fan gains a spectacle. The owner gains an annuity.
The strongest case against this argument is access, preservation and honest consent
There are serious responses, and they deserve to be stated properly.
The first is access. Most people alive today could never have seen the performers of earlier generations, and recordings capture only part of what a stage performance was. A well-made digital production can convey scale, staging and physical presence in ways that audio cannot, and for opera, jazz and rock repertoire that survives mainly as documentation, that has genuine cultural value. Dismissing it as morbid assumes an audience that had the option of the real thing and chose otherwise. Most did not.
The second is employment. These productions are not purely automated. They involve live musicians in many formats, plus animators, technicians, designers, riggers and venue staff. A long residency can provide steadier work than touring does, and the money spent flows through a broader set of hands than the framing of “rights holders versus fans” suggests.
The third, and strongest, is consent. Some avatar shows involve living artists who commissioned digital versions of themselves, supervised the capture and approved the result. In those cases the control objection collapses entirely: the artist is the author, and the avatar is a stage device no more troubling than a backing track or a pre-recorded film sequence. Extending suspicion from posthumous reconstructions to all digital performance conflates two quite different things.
The honest position is that the objection is about posthumous use without contemporaneous consent, not about the technology. Where the artist chose it, the winner is the artist.
What evidence would change the conclusion
This argument rests on inference from how rights and costs are structured, and it could be overturned by disclosure.
The most direct test would be transparent revenue reporting: published splits showing what share of ticket income from posthumous avatar productions reaches performers’ heirs, session contributors and the wider musical workforce, rather than concentrating in rights-holding entities and production companies. If those disclosures showed broad distribution, the central claim weakens considerably.
A second test is documented consent. If estates routinely published the instructions an artist left regarding posthumous likeness use — and if productions were shown to follow them, including refusing lucrative uses the artist would have rejected — then the control objection would be answered on the merits rather than assumed away.
A third is price and scale. If the technology becomes cheap enough that small institutions, archives and community venues can produce such work, the concentration argument fails, because the capability would no longer be confined to those able to fund years of research.
Finally, audience behaviour matters. If ticket buyers consistently report these shows as satisfying in their own right rather than as substitutes, and if attendance measurably drives listening to the original recordings and to living artists working in the same tradition, then the cultural benefit is real and widely spread. None of that evidence is currently available in public form, which is itself part of the problem.
Sources and further reading
- The Guardian, music section: the report on avatar concert production that prompted this discussion, including a producer’s account of the simulation techniques involved.
- Music industry trade publications: ongoing coverage of catalogue acquisitions, estate management and licensing of name and likeness rights.
- Academic work in media and performance studies on liveness, mediation and posthumous performance.
- Intellectual property law commentary from national bar associations and university law faculties on post-mortem publicity and personality rights.
Surfaced from the rss:guardian_music signal “digital avatar concerts”. AI-assisted draft, editorially reviewed.
