Concert avatars may soon blush. Barney Wragg, CEO of avatar-concert producer Unit1 Studio, described the ambition in a recent interview with IQ Magazine: "We [are] talk[ing] about using AI to simulate the way that tears evaporate in your eye between blinks, or subcutaneous blood flow, so that when one of our [digital] characters laughs or opens their mouth or smiles, areas of their flesh will change colour as it would do in a real human."

The claim is not idle. Last week Wragg announced a major investment in his company – a £15m round reported by the Guardian – to build what he calls hyper-realistic avatar entertainment. Unit1 plans to roll out avatars of living and dead musicians alike, positioning the runaway success of Abba Voyage as only the beginning of a wave of "hybrid" concerts. The commercial logic is clear: audiences already pay premium ticket prices to watch Agnetha and her bandmates perform as light.

Digital performers have been on stage for over a decade. Tupac appeared at Coachella in 2012. Abba Voyage opened in 2022 to reviews that called the avatar act "jaw-dropping" and destined to be copied. Maria Callas sang in hologram form on an Australian tour that reached Adelaide and Perth in December 2023. Each iteration has drawn crowds, and each has sharpened the technology's appeal to promoters: an avatar does not age, cancel or renegotiate.

The realism, however, has a ceiling the marketing rarely mentions. The Abba Voyage spectacle is a 2D illusion. Spectators believe they are seeing Agnetha in three dimensions, but the effect remains a new-fangled, fundamentally old-fashioned trick of the light – the 21st century's answer to the magic lantern, staged on a very expensive LED screen.

That gap between perception and mechanism sits at the centre of the debate the source piece raises. If the tears can be made to evaporate correctly and the flesh to flush, does it matter that no living musician stands on stage? The author of the original commentary answers no, stating a clear preference for flesh-and-blood live performance over watching the Fab Four or Maria Callas reconstructed in light.

The question of who benefits is harder. Dead artists cannot consent to new tours, and their estates, studios and investors collect the revenue. Living musicians face competition from versions of themselves – or of their predecessors – that never tire and never demand a cut beyond licensing. Fans get the spectacle, but the transaction substitutes simulation for presence.

Wragg's £15m bet assumes audiences will keep crossing that line. The evidence so far – packed houses for Abba Voyage, sold hologram dates for Callas more than four decades after her death – suggests he is right. Whether the performers blushing convincingly on stage are a technological marvel or an elegy for the live concert is the question the next wave of hybrid shows will answer.