Note disappointing lack of bedazzled cowboy hat
Media, Built is a newsletter about how modern media actually works. I break down how distribution, format, and systems shape what reaches people and what doesn’t. Drawing from operating experience across media, I focus on the gap between what gets made and what actually travels.
I came to London this week for the WXO - World Experience Organization summit, and Jonas Larsen and I decided to see ABBA Voyage before the sessions started. Full disclosure: I am not an ABBA fan. I have not seen Mamma Mia, nor do I plan. So I went in fairly reticent, dragged along by both Jonas and a light professional curiosity.
Also I really liked hologram Tupac back in the day.
Almost immediately I was fully in. The tech (and the accompanying execution) is extraordinary. The audience was all in. Three thousand people on their feet, clapping in unison and singing every word, in a room where thousands of people were losing themselves in something that was not actually there. Four people who haven't been a working touring band in more than forty years.
The implications of that for the media business are stunning, and they are not where most of the coverage has landed.
Six weeks ago I wrote from Vegas about Omega Mart and the Great Big Game Show - that piece was really about belonging. This one is about the parts of ABBA Voyage that most writeups leave out: the building, the capital expenditure, and the business model underneath the (pretty spectacular) virtual avatars. The numbers on that layer are sharper than most operators realize.
What $175 Million Actually Bought Them
ABBA refused to tour for four decades (although we did get a lot of Mamma Mia movies, so evaluate that cultural trade off as you will). The reported billion-dollar offer they turned down in 2000 is the version of the story many people remember. What is less told is what they built two decades later. In 2021 they announced a purpose-built venue in East London, designed from the ground up around a digital show. The whole project, the arena plus the avatars plus the production, cost around $175 million. Industrial Light and Magic built the digital ABBA. Stufish designed the building itself to be fully demountable so the whole thing can be taken apart and relocated when its London run ends.
What they built was capital expenditure, real estate, and a format designed to run without the band in the room. Four years later it still does, with 374 performances in 2024 at over 90 percent occupancy. The setlist rarely changes. The four members of ABBA, all over 75, rarely attend the show, and the operation runs without them being physically present.
A Business That Runs Without Them
I think a lot about ceiling dynamics in creator-led businesses, and most of the ones I advise have some version of the same structural problem. The talent is the one who creates and delivers the content, which makes the talent the cap. When the host gets sick, or needs a few weeks off, or hits the mental health wall that everyone eventually hits, the P&L has to adjust accordingly. This is true for creators, for podcast networks, for touring artists, for live franchises generally. The revenue curve tracks to a very human output because there is no other engine producing output.
ABBA Voyage inverted that structure at the architecture level. Aniara Ltd, the UK company behind the show, posted $133 million in 2024. That number repeats as long as the arena keeps running - recurring, infrastructure-led revenue that does not collapse when a band member is ill, does not fluctuate with tour fatigue, and is not gated by how many cities a group of septuagenarians can physically reach in a year (let's also take a moment to hat tip to the Rolling Stones, still touring to this day). The building runs the show and the show runs almost every night. That produces a revenue pattern most tours cannot match, and a lot of the creator economy is still built around tentpoles with ceilings infrastructure would not impose.
When Your Business Depends On One Person Showing Up
This is the question ABBA Voyage leaves on the table for any operator with a finite-talent asset. If your revenue curve tracks a single person's output, what would it look like to build something alongside them that could carry weight when they cannot?
For a podcast network built around one host voice, it might be a franchise format or a second line of shows that can run when the host cannot. For a creator-led commerce business, it might be a licensed product line that keeps earning when the creator is not posting. For a live franchise, it starts with asking whether the format could be produced at any scale without the principal in the room.
ABBA is obviously an extreme case. The band never needs to be on stage again for the business to keep running, and they had the brand equity and the capital to fund a project at that scale. Most operators are nowhere close to either edge. But the principle compounds early even at much smaller scale, and the sooner you start building something alongside the principal instead of entirely through them, the more room the business has before the constraint becomes the ceiling.
The building in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park runs seven shows a week, and the band does not have to be in the room for any of it to happen. ABBA Voyage is a very specific answer to a very specific problem. Four people who would not tour, a catalogue too valuable to leave dormant, and the capital to build around both. Very few operators will face that exact combination or have anywhere near those resources. But the structural question the show answers shows up in almost every creator-led business eventually: where is a single person the bottleneck, and what could be built alongside them that carries weight when they cannot. For most operators the answer will look nothing like a purpose-built arena in East London, and that is the point. The work is finding what it looks like for your business before the ceiling forces the question.