By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
The venerable glam rock band Kiss has played their final concert, but announced the band will live on indefinitely as digitized avatars.
The quartet that rose from New York City decades ago returned home to play their final live concerts over the weekend at Madison Square Garden, capping a half-century of rocking all night and partying every day.
But for fans, there was a major surprise at the end of the show, as the band introduced the digital avatars who will literally replace them. As the band members disappeared in a cloud of fire and smoke, four figures appeared on a screen behind them, as band member Paul Stanley shouted, “Kiss army, your love—your power—has made us immortal. The new Kiss era starts now. Oh yeah!”
That future is a glimpse of what many believe will be a major part of the future of music, and also of licensing. Kiss as a band has been very successful in licensing their image and brand over the decades, and they’ve now let it be known that the band will continue in digital form, theoretically forever.
This new era for Kiss and for music involves a partnership with the tech company Pophouse Entertainment, which rose to instant fame by creating digital versions of the young members of ABBA for that band’s ABBA Voyage show. We now know that the Kiss avatars were created by Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects company owned by George Lucas that changed the movie industry forever when it created the magic behind the first Star Wars movie in 1977. The band members also will leave their indelible stamp on their avatars, as they performed in motion capture suits to provide their avatars with their precise movements.
Industrial Light & Magic and Kiss are now working with Pophouse Entertainment Group, which was co-founded by former pop singer Bjorn Ulvaeus of ABBA.
While there are many Kiss fans who dismissed the idea that they would attend concerts starring digital recreations of the rock stars, the ABBA Voyage in London, where fans attend a full-length virtual ABBA concert, has been raking in $2 million a week. More importantly, the use of digital avatars means there could be multiple concerts taking place around the world simultaneously (no tour bus required), vastly increasing the potential for revenue.
Pophouse Entertainment CEO Per Sundin says the new technology allows Kiss, ABBA and other artists to continue performing and driving revenue theoretically forever, even after the band members have long departed this mortal coil.
“Kiss could have a concert in three cities in the same night across three different continents,” Sundin pointed out. “That’s what you could do with this.”
The big question is whether digital concerts are a fad or a long-term trend. On the negative side of the scale, many Kiss fans say they have little interest in seeing a digital recreation of their favorite musicians. The syndicated rock music host Eddie Trunk, a self-described Kiss fan, said there’s not much difference between digital avatars and watching a movie.
“I have very little interest in seeing an avatar concert of KISS, or anyone for that matter,” he said. “It’s like going to see a movie. It in no way is a replacement for the live concert experience. There’s no live music.”
On the other hand, younger music fans have shown a real interest not just in digital versions of their favorite musicians, but also in virtual bands that are literally created out of the minds of the programmers. The trend started with the creation of virtual influencers and early attempts at creating real-life performers as holograms, like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.
In 2012, Snoop Dogg stunned an audience at Coachella when he closed out his set by performing with a hologram of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur. Reactions were a bit mixed, with some finding it creepy, and others blown away by the possibilities. One of the latter was Martin Tudor, who in 2018 partnered with former Clear Channel CEO Brian Becker to launch Base Hologram, a production studio for holographic performances.
Based on the Tupac idea, Base has pushed forward by securing the rights for artists who have passed away, like Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, opera singer Maria Callas and in 2020 set up a tour for the deceased singer Whitney Houston.
However, the same technology works equally well with virtual people who never existed, as it does for people who did exist in the past, and the same goes for the even more powerful technology behind Augmented Reality (AR).
In 2018, Riot Games kicked off the League of Legends World Championships in Korea with a live concert that featured both illusory artists from the virtual girl band K/DA, and of course, an audience of real people watching the spectacle wearing AR lenses. Riot had experimented the year before by having a dragon fly over the crowd, but the K/DA concert went absolutely viral. Following the event, the song topped the Billboard music charts, was number one on Google Play for top songs, number one on iTunes for K-Pop, number two on iTunes for all pop, and had more than 242.8 million music streams in 2018 alone.
Riot has followed with increasingly advanced concerts at their 2019 event and in last month’s world championships in Shanghai, which featured a mixed performance featuring live singer Leixi Kiu and live dancers on stage with the virtual K/DA and Seraphine performing via a mixed AR/VR (Virtual Reality) presentation, all topped off with the appearance of a gigantic, towering figure of LOL character Galio, the Stone Colossus.
Since then, experimentation with augmented reality has become increasingly common in the music industry. For example, in October the K-pop star Mark Tuan worked with Soul Machines to create a virtual twin named Digital Mark. What made that collaboration so interesting was that he connected his avatar to the generative AI program ChatGPT, which allowed Tuan’s fans to literally have conversations with his avatar.
Another K-pop group in AR-crazed Korea called Aespa may be far from retirement, but the band members often perform next to their digital avatars. Another group called Eternity is similar to K/DA, as they consist entirely of virtual characters.
Kiss, however, is taking the idea of virtual stardom to a new level in the United States, as the first rock band to replace themselves with virtual characters.
“What we’ve accomplished has been amazing, but it’s not enough. The band deserves to live on because the band is bigger than we are,” said Paul Stanley. “It’s exciting for us to go the next step and see Kiss immortalized.”
“We can be forever young and forever iconic by taking us to places we’ve never dreamed of before,” Kiss bassist Gene Simmons added. “The technology is going to make Paul jump higher than he’s ever done before.”