Digital concerts have had a varied history with Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz pioneering the concept in the West and Japan’s Hatsune Miku continuing to sell out arenas in Asia. However, developments in 3D modelling technology in the last 10 years has given rise to an all new form digital concert. Perhaps most infamously, Coachella 2014 brought us Tupac resurrected and rendered in all of his early-2010s 3D glory. Although still essentially a projection on a large screen, the 2014 Coachella performance imprinted the hologram concert into the music zeitgeist. 

Fast forward ten years and we are now faced with a massive digital performance industry, whether that be entirely online events like Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert in 2020, or holographic arena shows like ABBA’s Voyage. While Voyage still works of the same technology as Tupac’s 2012 performance, all aspects of the process have been greatly improved: 3D modelling, motion capture, projection, lighting, and sound design have all been refined to a high degree in an attempt to convince the audience that they aren’t just looking at a big screen. Despite the band being as unlikely to return to the stage as Tupac, their digital renditions sold 1.4m tickets in its first year. 

Perhaps what hologram concerts need, to truly live up to their futuristic namesake, is a leap in technology. In comes Layered Reality, a UK based digital events specialist who have secured the rights to give Elvis Presley the Lazarus treatment. Layered Reality is a company that specialises in virtual reality (VR)  technology as a vehicle to tell immersive stories to participants. Although official material from Layered Reality is vague on the specifics of the Elvis experience, it appears that it will feature physical set and sound design used in combination with an augmented reality overlay (AR) viewed through a VR headset. 

In addition to this smorgasbord of technological bells and whistles, the digital Elvis will use AI models to generate new dialogue from the star. Speaking to the BBC, Layered Reality’s CEO, Andrew Guinness said: “The AI generates an authentic version of Elvis, born of original material, but it [also] allows you to do new things with him.” Much like the unofficial fan AI covers seen last year like ghostwriter977’s ‘Heart on my Sleeve’, Layered Reality will use old footage and recordings of Presley to train an AI program to mimic his voice. 

The experience is scheduled to take place in London sometime this year. Layered Reality offers a mailing list for those wanting to receive updates on specific locations and dates on their website. 

More recently, UMG has set its sights on AI assistant Claude 2, developed by American tech startup Anthropic PBC. Instead of focusing on supposedly stolen voice talent, UMG has joined Concord Publishing and ABKCO Records to contest the AI assistant’s use of copyrighted lyrics. The complaint filed by the three music labels argues that “Anthropic unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works—including the lyrics to myriad musical compositions owned or controlled by Publishers.” When the AI assistant Claude 2 is asked to recite lyrics from copyrighted music, they are regurgitated by the program. While websites like Genius, a large music lyric database, serve a similar function, they seek licensing agreements from the owners of the copyrighted material used on their site.

Even outside of music, AI companies have been in hot water over copyright law, with The Times filing a lawsuit against OpenAI, the operator of Chat GPT. The Times cites a similar claim to UMG, stating that their copyrighted materials are displayed by the program without permission. However, there is a deeper issue at the heart of both of these lawsuits. Copyrighted material is used to train these AI models. Understandably, both UMG and The Times are not thrilled by their material being used to improve the product of another business without credit or license. This is an issue posed by AI assistants across all mediums, with artists, musicians, and writers essentially having their work scraped from the internet and fed into a program that presents stolen work as original. 

ghotstwriter977’s ‘Heart on My Sleeve’ was a novelty designed to outline how producers and writers are often treated as disposable when compared to big-name artists like Drake. Speaking to CNN, ghostwriter977 said: “I was a ghostwriter for years and got paid close to nothing just for major labels to profit”. ghostwriter977 flipped this narrative on its head, producing and writing a compelling Drake song without involving the artist himself. In the case of Claude 2 and Chat GPT, the use of copyrighted content serves a less noble cause as many see the rise of generative AI programs to be reliant on the mass theft of other people’s work. This is an attitude expressed by UMC and associated parties in their filing against Anthropic.