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from the tear-a-corner-off-your-DREAD-card dept.
Digital Music News has a brief mention about ABBA's new digital costumes, made by Industrial Light and Magic, which will be used at the concert tour accompanying their album release. It sounds like a similar method as was used to make Andy Serkis look like Gollum, but this time making people look younger and fresher. It's unclear whether the avatars will be mapped on the fly to real movement happening along with the concert or just running through pre-precorded routines.
Creative Director Ben Morris says his company has recreated ABBA in its prime, from 1979. "We are creating them as digital characters, then use performance capture techniques to animate them and make them look perfectly real," Morris says.
Klaxons' James Righton and Little Boots will both appear as part of the live band. The reunion will be the first in four decades with "I Still Have Faith in You" and "Don't Shut Me Down" celebrating the announcement.
The new ABBA album Voyage will contain ten new tracks, with at least one Christmas song. Will the group dethrone Mariah Carey's Christmas tradition of taking the top of the Christmas charts? I guess we'll see later this year.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday September 09 2021, @10:29AM
I doubt they consider their target audience to be teenagers etc.
This arangement gives them most of the benefits of touring while keeping the advantages of staying at home for most of it. According to TFS, the band or, at least its hashtag, has gotten over a billion views so far on TikTok, though algorithms are sneaky tools, TikTok has allowed it. So the topic and probably the music is still popular with certain age groups and it's now yet another generation's turn to be in their late teens and early twenties.
When Abba peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, groups could rise to popularity through non-autotuned music because people actually enjoyed listening and/or dancing to. The music was played because it was popular not the other way around. With that popularity comes money and that is a different skill than writing and performing. Most of the biggest groups back then ended up running like businesses. By that I don't mean the usual for nowadays of into the ground and then ask for a handout. Instead I mean that they took care of the money and most of the management themselves. That leaves little to the vultures.
As far as I know, the Stones, the Eagles, and a few others also took that route. The other exreme was the route that Badfinger took or the screwing that many. including Prince and Van Morrison [faroutmagazine.co.uk], got from the labels. Even today, you get musicians like Samantha Fish who run their operation like a business.
Also, Abba doesn't have much competition. If one of today's autotuned, corporate-approved entertainers wanted to go on anon-standard tour, they'd have months or years of paperwork and committee meetings to deal with before getting moving and by that time the public attention will have moved onward. I'll go out on a limb and point out that the autotuned, corporate-approved entertainers are popular only because their owners control the distribution channels these days and would not get a much of a return on a heavy investment like this. Abba has been big money for a long time and still is. In 2014 ABBA turned down a $1 billion offer for another tour, though mainly because of an unreasonable number of performances. With that money, and their own control of it, comes independence to try this.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.