AI artists can't perform live? Gorillaz answered that in 2005, and Unit1 has $20m to scale it

Unit1 Studio has raised $20m to build concerts fronted by CGI doubles of real musicians, and to make those shows portable. Balderton Capital led the round through partner Daniel Waterhouse, an early Spotify backer, and the Guardian reported the raise on September 20. The London company puts the figure at close to £15m.

Barney Wragg founded Unit1 in October 2025 after 5 years running Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, and earlier digital roles at Universal Music, EMI and AEG. His co-founders are Jonathan Butterell, the director behind Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, and Pavle Mihajlovic, who co-founded the game studios Electric Saint and Flavourworks.

Unit1’s own pitch names two markets: artists who have stopped touring, and recreations of performances by musicians who have died.

I want to spend this one on a third market Unit1’s pitch leaves out.

Gorillaz, Hatsune Miku and Anyma already answered the touring question

Scroll the comments under any story about an AI artist and the same line shows up: fine, but they can never perform live. It gets posted as a checkmate. It’s been wrong since 2005.

Gorillaz put 2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel on a real stage at the MTV EMAs that year, and again at the 2006 Grammys next to Madonna, using a Pepper’s Ghost rig called Musion Eyeliner. Damon Albarn’s own verdict, given to Billboard years later, is worth keeping: brilliant on TV, awful in the room. The 2007 hologram tour got cancelled because it cost too much and the invisible screen shook when the bass came up.

So the thing that stopped it wasn’t the concept. It was money and a vibrating screen.

By the 2010 Plastic Beach tour the band had stopped pretending the characters were the ones holding the instruments. The players are on stage and the characters are on the screen above them, which is the same split ABBA Voyage and Unit1 sell today.

Hatsune Miku has played 91 shows since the Miku Expo tours started in May 2014, with a live band behind pre-recorded vocals and the character projected on glass, or on LED since 2024. Miku is a Crypton Future Media voice product from 2007. She is, by any honest definition, a synthetic artist who tours.

The dance world skipped the argument entirely. Anyma ran the first electronic residency at Sphere, where the thing people photograph is not the DJ. It’s the digital figure above him.

Why Unit1’s KT Tunstall pilot matters more than the avatar itself

An avatar concert is a CGI version of the performer, driven by motion capture and played back on screens with a real band on stage. The expensive part has never been the double. It’s that every show gets tuned to one room, so it stays in that room.

Unit1 tested the alternative with KT Tunstall, who worked with Wragg during his time at EMI. Motion capture cameras filmed her in a London studio recreating a performance she gave on Later… with Jools Holland around 20 years ago, and the avatar was updated to how she looks now.

The demo ran from late 2025 at Brompton Technology’s test site in Gunnersbury. Moving it to a permanent studio at Tileyard London took 4 days, screens included, with the CGI re-tuned to the new room’s lighting and acoustics.

That is the claim the money is buying.

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Our ability to develop these shows at a fraction of the cost and replicate them to any location finally makes these shows a commercial reality.

What an AI artist like China Styles actually has to decide

An artist who releases through Suno and fronts the project with an avatar is a virtual artist. That category is older than streaming, and it already has 3 working routes onto a stage.

Route 1 is already the biggest by headcount. AI tracks are 46% of Roblox’s top music and take 58% of the likes, and Alan Walker built a whole Fortnite theme park around the same idea. Route 2 is what Unit1, Roger Taylor’s comments about a Queen show and the KISS avatars arriving in Las Vegas in 2028 are all buying into.

Route 3 is the cheapest and the most common, and it’s the one the comment sections keep missing. China Styles is Margaret Bynum from Mississippi, writing from her own 1995 diary. Olivia B. Moore is Olivia Moore from Atlanta, and she shows her face. Both are signed to Hallwood Media and both disclose the AI. There is a person available to walk on stage in either case.

Moore is booked to do exactly that. She’s on the bill to perform at the first AI Music Awards in Los Angeles on November 13, alongside Xania Monet.

Monet is the one to watch on the night. She’s the most visible AI act in the market, signed by Hallwood Media in a reported multi-million-dollar deal after offers reached $3 million, and the first AI project to land a song on a Billboard radio airplay chart. If the format works for anyone, it works for her first.

SIQA has not said how the vocals get delivered on stage, and that detail is the one I’d want answered before calling it a performance.

Digital revivals aren’t new either, and Queen has been circling a Freddie Mercury version for years. Base Hologram has toured Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and Whitney Houston, Eyellusion did the same with Ronnie James Dio, and HologramUSA runs a permanent Los Angeles venue. Those are one-off productions or single-venue residencies, which is the economics Unit1 says it has changed.

Unit1 has hired VFX artists Greg Meeres Young and Sefki Ibrahim, both of whom worked on ABBA Voyage. So the team that built the £140m benchmark is now working on the cheaper version of it, and no artist has been announced yet.

Which leaves the honest version of the objection. Not whether an AI artist can play live, because Miku settled that over 91 shows. Whether anyone will put $20m behind that particular act, and what the likeness clause says when they do.