The former chief executive of Andrew Lloyd Webber\u2019s entertainment group has obtained a near-\u00a315m investment for his UK music tech startup that hopes to recreate classic concerts by manifesting musicians as digital avatars.<\/p>\n
Unit1 was set up last year by Barney Wragg, an entertainment executive who ran Lord Lloyd-Webber\u2019s Cats-to-Evita empire for five years from late 2011. It has secured the $20m in funding from a group of investors, including tech backer Balderton Capital through its partner Daniel Waterhouse, who made early investments in Spotify.<\/p>\n
The company hopes to stage concerts fronted by the \u201chyper realistic\u201d digital avatars of living artists who are no longer touring and by recreating existing performances from dead musicians. In the latter case, it will develop the avatars through a mixture of archive footage and hiring actors and musicians who either look or play like the departed star, before blending the footage together.<\/p>\n
Barney Wragg, the founder of Unit1, ran Andrew Lloyd Webber\u2019s empire for five years. Photograph: Unit1<\/p>\n
Unit1 has tested the technology with Scottish singer-songwriter and musician KT Tunstall<\/a>, who worked with Wragg during a stint at the music company EMI. In the pilot, Tunstall was filmed in a London studio<\/a> by motion capture cameras as she recreated a two-decade-old performance on Later\u2026 with Jools Holland, using the avatar to update her features to the way she looks now.<\/p>\n