ABBA’s successful avatar show in London offers a glimpse at a daring new direction for live music
LONDON — Before the launch of “ABBA Voyage,” the London concert performed by 3D digital avatars of the iconic Swedish band, member Björn Ulvaeus said they hoped audiences would “feel that they’ve gone through something that they’ve never seen before.”
Following its May 27 debut, much of the reaction from domestic and international critics, fans and industry professionals has been rapturous.
“Other than the team involved, no one really knew how they would integrate an avatar-based performance,” Sarah Cox, director of live event technical consultancy Neutral Human, told CNBC. “That blew me away as someone working on real-time graphics. My jaw hit the floor. You look around and people are really buying into the idea that ABBA are there.”
Demand has been strong — the show’s run has been extended to November 2023 and could well go beyond that.
And the team has confirmed it aims to take the show around the world.
“Our ambition is to do another ABBA Voyage, let’s say in North America, Australasia, we could do another one in Europe. We can duplicate the arena and the show,” producer Svana Gisla told a U.K. government committee session in November.
It also expects other shows to begin following the same model.
“The tech itself isn’t new but the way in which we’ve used it and scale and barriers we’ve broken down are new. I’m sure others will follow and are planning to follow,” Gisla said.
That could “absolutely” be the case somewhere like Las Vegas, where some shows run round the clock with rotating crews, she added.
“We have live musicians, so we keep our band and do seven shows over five days a week. But you could roll round the clock. Vegas will quickly adopt this style of entertainment and do Elvis or the Beatles.”
Money, money, money
Voyage’s venue, dubbed the ABBA Arena, was built specifically for the show on a site in Stratford in east London, with its 3,000 capacity comprising a standing pit, tiered seats along three sides with no restricted view, and higher-priced private “dance booths,“ as well as space for the extensive kit positioned in the roof and what creators White Void say is the largest permanent kinetic lighting installation in the world.
View of the ABBA Arena on May 26, 2022 in London, England.
Dave J Hogan | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
It was also designed for flexibility. It was constructed on a one meter raised platform without breaking ground, and could be disassembled and reconstructed elsewhere — or stay in place and host another show in future.
But emulating Voyage’s model — which sees digital replicas of the four band members perform classic hits and newer numbers for 90 minutes, while also interacting with each other and speaking to the audience between songs — will be no easy task.
The show was in the works for five years and had a £141 million ($174.9 million) budget funded by global investors. It needs to get around 3 million people through its doors to break even, according to Gisla, and the average ticket price is £75.
After choosing their set list and making other creative decisions, the ABBA members did five weeks of performance in motion capture suits. Hundreds of visual effects artists then worked on the show for two years, led by the London branch of Industrial Light & Magic, a visual effects company founded by George Lucas.
Promotional image for ABBA Voyage, the digital avatar-based live show currently running in London.
Johan Persson | ABBA Voyage
A decade ago, a Coachella performance featuring an apparent hologram of Tupac Shakur impressed audiences and hinted at alternative reality’s potential in live shows, with the artist’s likeness digitally recreated without using archive footage.
While not meeting the technical definition of a hologram, which uses laser beams to construct an object with depth, the visual effects team projected a 2D image onto an angled piece of glass, which was itself projected onto a Mylar screen, creating a 3D effect. Shakur then “performed” two songs with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, 16 years after his death.
The Voyage team is tight-lipped about exactly how their show works, but previously confirmed it is not a laser-based hologram either. It involves 65-million pixel screens which give the impression of the band performing life-size on stage in 3D in real time, with traditional-style concert screens showing close-ups and different views on either side.
Its servers are being pushed to the “absolute extreme” to render the images without lag, Gisla said, such that they are shaking through some transitions. She also acknowledged that the 10-meter high side screens are “very unforgiving” on detail and there are improvements that could be made.
Rapper Snoop Dogg (L) and a “hologram” of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur perform on stage on the third day of the 2012 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival.
Christopher Polk | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
But, she added, with real-time render speeds becoming quicker, “Benny and Bjorn could be sitting in a chair at home connected to their avatar, updating them to talk about last night’s football result to the audience. That will come.”
Next steps
Consultant Sarah Cox said the kind of processing and motion capture technology used by Voyage is still prohibitively expensive for most productions, but believes it is a “brand-new format that will be replicated time and time again,” particularly somewhere like Las Vegas.
“An immersive venue could host multiple shows. And then the cost comes down, because you have the technology stack, the venue, and all the money goes into creating the avatar and virtual experience and tweaking the programing.”
Many will remain skeptical of digital avatar-based gigs, particularly if they are wary of the general trend toward metaverse-based virtual experiences.
Bjorn Ulvaeus himself previously told CNBC he has concerns about the misuse of the technology to create nefarious “deep fakes” which will be “indistinguishable from the real thing going forward.”
There is also the question of finding suitable artists for shows. ABBA is a rare proposition as a band with a large catalogue of hits, a multi-generational worldwide fanbase, and a full set of members who are on-board with the show — but who have not toured together for 40 years.
ABBA avatars perform their 1981 song The Visitors in London, 2022.
Johan Persson | ABBA Voyage
“Posthumously you can put artists back on stage, ethically you may or may not have a view on that,” said Gisla. “Having ABBA partake in this is I can say this is an ABBA concert. ABBA made the decisions, chose what to wear, chose their set list, ABBA made this show.”
For an artist like Elvis with an extensive visual and audio archive you could create an accurate replica, but without the input that makes this show feel so tangible, she said.
For Cox, live shows that provide a “shared experience” like ABBA Voyage hold a greater appeal than headset-based virtual experiences, though there will certainly be more of those available in future.
And both AR and VR are spreading in the worlds of gaming, events, sports, theater and beyond.
Digital avatar experiments have included musician Travis Scott premiering a song within the wildly popular game Fortnite in 2020, with his avatar looming over players who were still moving around within the world of the game. It got a reported 45.8 million viewers across five shows. Lil Nas X performed the same year in the game Roblox.
A 15 year-old plays Fortnite and Travis Scott Present: Astronomical on April 23, 2020, in Los Angeles, United States.
Frazer Harrison | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Jo Twist, chief executive of trade body UK Interactive Entertainment, said she was noticing growing opportunities in the intersections between games, music and entertainment experiences.
“While these kind of experiences have mostly been the preserve of the biggest artists so far, we believe that growth in both the number of people who play, and online game worlds that enable user generated content, could open games up to all kinds of performers, allowing them to successfully tap into its enormous player base to raise their profile.” she said.
Giulia De Paoli, founder and general manager of show design and AR studio Ombra, has worked on projects bringing “extended reality” — spanning AR and VR — to live sports.
“AR has permitted us to create a full show for broadcast events that would be impossible with traditional projection and LED setups, like creating huge 10-meter flying numbers and flames around the arena,” she said.
“We see this developing into a full experience for people to watch live and, as the word says, augmenting the reality around us, gamifying, interacting and seeing impossible things happen.”
Tik Tok creators gather before a press conference to voice their opposition to the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” pending crackdown legislation on TikTok in the House of Representatives, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 12, 2024.
Craig Hudson | Reuters
The Supreme Court on Friday will hear oral arguments in the case involving the future of TikTok in the U.S., which could ban the popular app as soon as next week.
The justices will consider whether the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the law that targets TikTok’s ban and imposes harsh civil penalties for app “entities” that continue to carry the service after Jan.19, violates the U.S. Constitution’s free speech protections.
It’s unclear when the court will hand down a decision, and if China’s ByteDance continues to refuse to divest TikTok to an American company, it faces a complete ban nationwide.
What will change about the user experience?
The roughly 115 million U.S. TikTok monthly active users could face a range of scenarios depending on when the Supreme Court hands down a decision.
If no word comes before the law takes effect on Jan. 19 and the ban goes through, it’s possible that users would still be able to post or engage with the app if they already have it downloaded. However, those users would likely be unable to update or redownload the app after that date, multiple legal experts said.
Thousands of short-form video creators who generate income from TikTok through ad revenue, paid partnerships, merchandise and more will likely need to transition their businesses to other platforms, like YouTube or Instagram.
“Shutting down TikTok, even for a single day, would be a big deal, not just for people who create content on TikTok, but everyone who shares or views content,” said George Wang, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute who helped write the institute’s amicus briefs on the case.
“It sets a really dangerous precedent for how we regulate speech online,” Wang said.
Who supports and opposes the ban?
Dozens of high-profile amicus briefs from organizations, members of Congress and President-elect Donald Trump were filed supporting both the government and ByteDance.
The government, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, alleges that until ByteDance divests TikTok, the app remains a “powerful tool for espionage” and a “potent weapon for covert influence operations.”
Trump’s brief did not voice support for either side, but it did ask the court to oppose banning the platform and allow him to find a political resolution that allows the service to continue while addressing national security concerns.
The short-form video app played a notable role in both Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ presidential campaigns in 2024, and it’s one of the most common news sources for younger voters.
In a September Truth Social post, Trump wrote in all caps Americans who want to save TikTok should vote for him. The post was quoted in his amicus brief.
What comes next?
It’s unclear when the Supreme Court will issue its ruling, but the case’s expedited hearing has some predicting that the court could issue a quick ruling.
The case will have “enormous implications” since TikTok’s user base in the U.S. is so large, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law.
“It’s unprecedented for the government to prohibit platforms for speech, especially one so many people use,” Chemerinsky said. “Ultimately, this is a tension between free speech issues on the one hand and claims of national security on the other.”
WATCH: It appears TikTok could really get shut down, says Jim Cramer
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks about Project Digits personal AI supercomputer for researchers and students during a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 6, 2025. Gadgets, robots and vehicles imbued with artificial intelligence will once again vie for attention at the Consumer Electronics Show, as vendors behind the scenes will seek ways to deal with tariffs threatened by US President-elect Donald Trump. The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) opens formally in Las Vegas on January 7, 2025, but preceding days are packed with product announcements. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was greeted as a rock star this week CES in Las Vegas, following an artificial intelligence boom that’s made the chipmaker the second most-valuable company in the world.
At his nearly two-hour keynote on Monday kicking off the annual conference, Huang packed a 12,000-seat arena, drawing comparisons to the way Steve Jobs would reveal products at Apple events.
Huang concluded with an Apple-like trick: a surprise product reveal. He presented one of Nvidia’s server racks and, using some stage magic, held up a much smaller version, which looked like a tiny cube of a computer.
“This is an AI supercomputer,” Huang said, while donning an alligator skin leather jacket. “It runs the entire Nvidia AI stack. All of Nvidia’s software runs on this.”
Huang said the computer is called Project Digits and runs off a relative of the Grace Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) that are currently powering the most advanced AI server clusters. The GPU is paired with an ARM-based Grace central processing unit (CPU). Nvidia worked with Chinese semiconductor company MediaTek to create the system-on-a chip called GB10.
Formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, CES is typically the spot to launch flashy and futuristic consumer gadgets. At this year’s show, which started on Tuesday and wraps up on Friday, several companies announced AI integrations with appliances, laptops and even grills. Other major announcements included a laptop from Lenovo which has a rollable screen that can expand vertically. There were also new robots, including a Roomba competitor with a robotic arm.
Unlike Nvidia’s traditional GPUs for gaming, Project Digits isn’t targeting consumers. instead, it’s aimed at machine learning researchers, smaller companies, and universities that want to developed advanced AI but don’t have the billions of dollars to build massive data centers or buy enough cloud credits.
“There’s a gaping hole for data scientists and ML researchers and who are actively working, who are actively building something,” Huang said. “Maybe you don’t need a giant cluster. You’re just developing the early versions of the model, and you’re iterating constantly. You could do it in the cloud, but it just costs a lot more money.”
The supercomputer will cost about $3,000 when it becomes available in May, Nvidia said, and will be available from the company itself as well as some of its manufacturing partners. Huang said Project Digits is a placeholder name, indicating it may change by the time the computer goes on sale.
“If you have a good name for it, reach out to us,” Huang said.
Diversifying its business
It’s a dramatically different kind of product from the GPUs that have driven Nvidia’s historic boom in the past two years. OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT in late 2022, and other AI model creators like Anthropic have joined with large cloud providers in snapping up Nvidia’s data center GPUs because of their ability to power the most intensive models and computing workloads.
Data center sales accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s $35 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter.
Wall Street is focused on Nvidia’s ability to diversify its business so that it’s less reliant on a handful of customers buying massive AI systems.
The Nvidia Project Digits supercomputer during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025.
Bridget Bennett | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“It was a little scary to see Nvidia come out with something so good for so little in price,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note this week. He said Nvidia may have “stolen the show,” due to Project Digits as well other announcements including graphics cards for gaming, new robot chips and a deal with Toyota.
Project Digits, which runs Linux and the same Nvidia software used on the company’s GPU server clusters, represents a huge increase in capabilities for researchers and universities, said David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Bader, who has worked on research projects with Nvidia in the past, said the computer appears to be able to handle enough data and information to train the biggest and most cutting-edge models. He told CNBC Anthropic, Google, Amazon and others “would pay $100 million to build a super computer for training” to get a system with these sorts of capabilities.
For $3,000, users can soon get a product they can plug into a standard electrical outlet in their home or office, Bader said. It’s particularly exciting for academics, who have often left for private industry in order to access bigger and more powerful computers, he said.
“Any student who is able to have one of these systems that cost roughly the same as a high-end laptop or gaming laptop, they’ll be able to do the same research and build the same models,” Bader said.
Reitzes said the computer may be Nvidia’s first move into the $50 billion market for PC and laptop chips.
“It’s not too hard to imagine it would be easy to just do it all themselves and allow the system to run Windows someday,” Reitzes wrote. “But I guess they don’t want to step on too many toes.”
Huang didn’t rule out that possibility when asked about it by Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.
He said that MediaTek may be able to sell the GB10 chip to other computer makers in the market. He made sure to leave some mystery in the air.
“Obviously, we have plans,” Huang said.
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