• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

There may be no better example of the strange new collision between nostalgia, technology, and synthetic reality than ABBA’s AI show.

For decades, ABBA represented something deeply human: harmony, emotion, memory. Their music was analog joy pressed into vinyl. Then came “ABBA Voyage,” the wildly successful London concert experience where digital “ABBAtars” perform on stage as younger versions of themselves, powered by motion capture, visual effects, and a small army of technologists.

The audience knows the performers are not physically there. And yet emotionally and culturally, they are absolutely present. People cry. They sing along. They experience it as real. That matters because “ABBA Voyage” is no longer just a concert -- but  a business model.

For years, holograms and digital performances felt gimmicky. Tupac at Coachella. Tech demos searching for a reason to exist. But “ABBA Voyage” crossed a line. It became emotionally convincing, commercially scalable, and culturally accepted all at once.

That’s why the Rolling Stones paying attention matters. Mick Jagger recently called the show a “technology breakthrough” and openly suggested the concept could help keep the Stones performing indefinitely. At the same time, Queen guitarist Brian May has floated the possibility of hologram technology reuniting the original Queen lineup at Sphere in Las Vegas.

ABBA may have opened the door, but they are unlikely to be alone for long. Kiss is already developing an avatar show with the same Pophouse Entertainment team behind “ABBA Voyage,” and reports suggest the Spice Girls have explored similar ideas tied to the group’s 30th anniversary.

That’s the moment this stops being an isolated entertainment story and starts becoming a glimpse into the future of media itself.

The traditional concert industry has always been constrained by biology. Human beings age. Touring is exhausting. Insurance costs rise. Voices change, and bodies break down. AI-enhanced performance entirely bypasses these issues.

“ABBA Voyage” reportedly cost around £140 million to develop, but now functions more like infrastructure than a tour. From a business perspective, it behaves less like live entertainment and more like a theme-park attraction fused with cinematic realism and emotional memory. And importantly, audiences seem completely comfortable with the illusion.

The producers behind “Voyage” insist the show was never “about the tech.” They describe it instead as an attempt to create something emotional, beautiful, something unmistakably ABBA. They argue that the audience responds because Agnetha, Björn, Benny, and Frida were directly involved, and because “ABBA’s DNA is in everything.”

That phrase is more revealing than they may realize, because AI systems are increasingly being trained to reproduce creative DNA itself. Not just songs, but style, gesture, voice, and emotional familiarity.

Today, audiences still care whether the original members approved the production. But future audiences may encounter AI-generated performances first, alongside “new” songs assembled from archived vocals, generative music systems, and predictive audience data. The line between preservation and fabrication begins to collapse.

The artist slowly transforms from a person into an endlessly renewable media asset. That creates enormous opportunities, but it also creates profound cultural questions.

Can a machine-generated performance still carry emotional truth? If audiences laugh, dance, cry, and feel transformed, does the synthetic nature of the experience matter? Or does emotional resonance become the only authenticity test people care about?

“ABBA Voyage” suggests the answer may already be yes.

And once you start thinking about the Spice Girls, the whole thing becomes even more inevitable.

Because the Spice Girls were never only about the music. They were identity, personality, attitude, fashion, and cultural mythology all rolled into one. Which makes them almost perfectly suited for the next generation of AI-enhanced performance.

Imagine a permanent immersive Spice Girls experience in London, Las Vegas, Seoul, or Dubai, where audiences relive “Wannabe” with digitally perfected versions of Baby, Scary, Sporty, Ginger, and Posh exactly as they remember them. Not older or diminished, but preserved at the peak of cultural memory.

That’s the real power AI introduces into entertainment: It allows media companies to preserve celebrities not as people, but as emotionally optimized memories. And audiences may actually prefer this.

Fans often say they want authenticity, but what they often want is emotional consistency: the feeling of being 16 again, soundtracked by school dances, MTV afternoons, and road trips.

The Spice Girls also point toward something even more disruptive: personality simulation. Each Spice Girl functioned as a recognizable archetype. Future systems won’t simply recreate songs and choreography, but interviews, fan interactions, and even entirely synthetic “new” moments.

At some point, the line between performer and intellectual property fully dissolves. That has implications far beyond music, for the likes of actors, athletes, politicians and news anchors.

The same technology stack powering "ABBA Voyage" will eventually collide with generative AI, conversational agents, voice synthesis, and photorealistic video generation. Suddenly audiences are no longer simply watching performances. They are interacting with synthetic identities trained on decades of archived behavior.

We are moving from fixed media to generative media. Static recordings become living systems. Content no longer ends, but evolves continually in response to audiences, algorithms, and engagement signals.

The irony is that much of this will initially feel joyful and fun -- even magical. There is something genuinely beautiful about preserving cultural moments people love.

But not everyone sees this future as progress.

Nick Cave called AI-generated songwriting “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human,” arguing that great art comes from lived experience. Elton John and Paul McCartney have also warned about voice cloning and synthetic misuse, even as McCartney embraced AI-assisted restoration technology for what became known as the “final Beatles song.”

This tension may define the next decade of culture because the question is no longer whether AI can reproduce performance convincingly. It clearly can. The question is whether audiences eventually stop caring about the distinction altogether.

And once culture accepts emotionally convincing simulations as normal, politics, journalism, and advertising won’t be far behind.

The future of truth may not arrive with a breaking news alert. It may arrive with a standing ovation.

As ABBA so presciently predicted: “The winner takes it all, the loser standing small…”