The Economist June 4th 2022 Culture 75paying viewers online and in cinemas. By
2028, according to midia,live-streamed
concerts will generate $4bn-5bn a year,
more than at the height of the pandemic.
Last year Live Nation, the biggest live-en-
tertainment company, acquired Veeps, a
live-streaming startup. Spotify and Deezer,
subscription music services, have both
done deals with Driift.
The name of the game
A recent tour by Little Mix, a British pop
group, gives an idea of the new normal. The
trio played 24 dates in April and May, in
arenas packed with giddy teenagers. They
commissioned Driift to live-stream the fi-
nal show, which sold nearly 60,000 tickets
at £13 to fans in 143 countries. Another
29,000 paid to watch the feed in cinemas,
suggesting total streaming ticket sales of a
little over £1.1m. Producing the live video
cost about £250,000. “There’s nothing like
being in the room,” says Steve Homer, the
chief executive of aeg Presents, a live-
events giant which promoted Little Mix’s
in-person gigs. But streaming has become
“a good bolt-on”.
Some artists see it as more than that. As
social media have squeezed musicians in-
to ever shorter formats, an hour-long
video-concert is “an opportunity to create
beautiful long-form content”, says Mr
Salmon. Digital gigs also provide artists
with more data about their fans.
Meanwhile, a new breed of online gam-
ing experience is allowing some artists to
transcend the constraints of real-life
shows. In concerts held on Fortnite, an on-
line video game, Travis Scott has mutated
into a giant and Ariana Grande has sprout-
ed wings and let her fans ride flying uni-
corns. Roblox, another gaming platform,
hosted a Wild West-themed concert in
which Lil Nas X appeared as a colossal cow-
boy. Minecraft, a world-building online
game, has held music festivals. No one
thinks such shows are substitutes for in-
person performances, but they seem to be
outliving the pandemic as an evolving en-
tertainment category in their own right.
These varied formats and technologies
hold out the tantalising prospect for fans—
and concert promoters—of more opportu-
nities to see artists perform. Life on the
road is draining, especially for ageing stars
or those with children. abba’s virtual show
is in some ways an extension of its early
adoption of the music video in the 1970s,
which helped the band become world-
famous despite doing only a handful of in-
ternational tours. “Voyage” can play to
hundreds of thousands of fans a year for as
long as the band members—or perhaps,
one day, their estates—choose.
In theory there is no limit to who could
take advantage of this technology. Already
Whitney Houston, who died in 2012, per-
forms six nights a week in a Las Vegas ho-
tel, in what the show’s organisers describe
as “holographic” form. Buddy Holly, Roy
Orbison, Maria Callas and Tupac Shakur
have been brought back for similar posthu-
mous concerts.
The abba concert shows how to opti-
mise the effect. The proof of the show’s
persuasiveness came at the end of the pre-
miere when, after a closing rendition of
“The Winner Takes It All”, the Abbatars de-
parted and the real abba members came on
stage to take a bow. It was the final trick
played on the audience: the “real” band
members turned out to be another illu-
sion. They vanished and the real-real abba
came on stage, to a wild ovation.
“Voyage” had sold more than 300,000
tickets before its opening night; the 3,000-
capacity London arena is almost fully
booked for summer. A quarter of the tick-
ets have been bought by fans overseas. If
the Abbatars are a hit they may perform si-
multaneously in other cities: the advan-tage of virtual talent is that “you can just
copy-paste them”, says Svana Gisla, a pro-
ducer of “Voyage”. (What’s more, she adds,
“they don’t take days off and they don’t get
covid.”) Entertainment companies have
sent scouts to the show. It may give other
ageing rock stars something to ponder.
Ludvig Andersson, Benny’s son and a
producer of the show, is also trying to wrap
his mind around the experience of work-
ing alongside a recreation of his 33-year-
old father. Digitally capturing the band
members reminded him of the “19th-cen-
tury idea of a camera sucking out your
soul...That’s exactly what we did.” He has
come to think of the Abbatars as individ-
uals in their own right: a “combination of
them being abba and them being themsel-
ves...A ghost in the machine.” Whoever or
whatever they are, the troupers, immortal-
ised in 120 terabytes, are destined to go on
entertaining new audiences, frozen for
ever in 1979. IntermediariesStuck in the middle with you
I
n 2011 there was an outbreak of E. coli in
Germany. Thousands of people fell ill.
The authorities suspected that salad ingre-
dients were to blame, but did not know
which ones were contaminated with the
bacteria. Their initial guess was Spanishcucumbers—and so European consumers
avoided that country’s fresh produce. Only
later did the authorities find that salad
sprouts grown in Germany were to blame.
The reason for the confusion, argues
Kathryn Judge, a professor at Columbia
Law School, was the complex supply
chains that have developed in the global
economy. It is not easy for regulators, let
alone consumers, to know where goods
come from. She draws a parallel with the
subprime-mortgage crisis of 2007: loansA new book lays out the problems with complex supply chainsDirect: The Rise of the Middleman
Economy and the Power of Going to the
Source. By Kathryn Judge. Harper Business;
304 pages; $29.99 and £22A mango at the price of a stone