Unit1 Studio has raised €23.3M (£20M), money the London producer will spend on making avatar concerts portable – a single show appearing in several cities instead of being rebuilt for each one.
The financing arrives in two parts: an equity round that was oversubscribed, led by Balderton Capital, and a production facility that sits alongside it. Mercuri, Gilston Music and Paul McGuinness, U2’s long-time manager, all returned as existing investors.
ABBA Voyage settled one argument: audiences will pay to watch digital performers in a room built for them. It also exposed the flaw – building a show at that scale, then moving it, has cost too much for anyone to repeat at volume.
Unit1 says it has cracked that. Its productions mix visual effects, CGI and live performance, and the company claims a show can shift to a new venue faster and far more cheaply than the norm, so one build can serve several locations without being recreated each time. The evidence offered is a KT Tunstall demo-concert moved out of Brompton Technology’s testing site in Gunnersbury, west London, into a permanent studio at Tileyard London – a relocation it completed in four days.
“ABBA Voyage proved audiences love avatar concerts but the development and relocation costs have meant the opportunity of avatar concerts is not being realised,” founder Barney Wragg said.
Wragg is a music-industry veteran, with earlier roles at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, AEG, EMI and Universal Music Group. The production money pays for the slate already in development; the equity funds the technology underneath it. Both halves matter, because a portable format only pays off once there are enough finished shows to move around.
