> Sadly, photorealistic avatars will be the future of music too. Did you know ABBA is on a (virtual) tour called Voyage? Since launching in May 2022, the show has sold 99% of seats and makes $2M a week. And unlike pesky musicians, virtual avatars never age and can play anywhere/anytime without requiring amphetamines or someone removing the brown M&Ms from a bowl backstage. So get ready for more Metaverse-chorus-verse performances moving forward.
No, not at all; this is about real performers, still performing "live" (i.e. doing a performance each night that people hear as it is performed, with live sound engineering, unscripted elements, etc) — but without the performers and crew having to live together in a tour bus 22 hours a day for months in order to do a tour.
When you think about it, it's pretty weird that there is this expectation of musicians going "on tour" for nearly an entire year at a time, hitting every major city on a continent during each tour, and then doing it all again one or two years later. We don't expect e.g. musical theatre troupes to tour like that. Theatre troupes might sometimes visit select places, sure — but if you live in most parts of the world, if you want to see a stage production, you are going to be the one getting on a flight to go to where that production "lives" (and serves, most of the time, as an attraction for the city the actors live and work in!)
I said that we don't make them tour. They can do so if they want, but they don't have to do so to run a profitable show, and so they don't have to run themselves ragged doing it. They can just tour for short bursts when they're all feeling up to it, visiting only large cities where it makes sense, staying long enough at each city to treat the place as a short vacation, and taking a long break after the tour before the next one.
The issue is that if a Broadway show loses a cast member for whatever reason they cast another one. A band can't exactly do that. If the criteria were 'play the songs written by X by the most talented people available' then I am sure that (barring IP issues) you could set that up in a major city for a weekly seasonal show, but since people want to see the original band members, that isn't what we get.
Simone, anyone?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film)