South Korean label Kakao Entertainment has launched a new four-member virtual K-Pop girl group called MAVE in January. The members Siu, Zena, Tyra, and Marty are presented as human-like avatars with natural-looking movements and facial expressions. They speak Korean, English, French and Bahasa, although they are not able to respond to prompts and only rely on scripts prepared by humans. MAVE's debut single 'Pandora' was released just two months ago and has also already generated over 20 million streams on Spotify alone, Reuters reports. The music video for the track has already racked up more than 20 million views on YouTube and they also have over 172,000 subscribers on the platform.

The success of ABBA Voyage, the avatar show based on the Swedish band set in London, could be replicated elsewhere in the world, in Las Vegas, Australasia, or somewhere else in Europe, CNBC reports. "We can duplicate the arena and the show” producer Svana Gisla told, adding - “the tech itself isn’t new but the way in which we’ve used it and scale and barriers we’ve broken down are new. I’m sure others will follow and are planning to follow”. It's really just a technical question, according to Gisla - “we have live musicians, so we keep our band and do seven shows over five days a week. But you could roll round the clock. Vegas will quickly adopt this style of entertainment and do Elvis or the Beatles”. However, it was no easy task - the London show was in the works for five years and had a £141 million (€160 million, $174.9 million) budget funded by global investors. It needs to get around 3 million people through its doors to break even, and the average ticket price is £75 (€85, $91).

Universal Music Group has inked an expansive global partnership with “avatar technology company” Genies to develop avatars and digital wearables for some of the world’s most influential and successful recording artists including Justin Bieber, J Balvin, Rihanna, Shawn Mendes and Migos. UMG and Genies will equip artists “with official virtual identities for use in Web 3.0 and the shifting age of the Internet”. Music Business Worldwide brings the whole story.