Virtual Music Worlds – Part 1: A Historical Review

The rise of generative AI has made it easy to create virtual musicians. Their look can be designed using AI, and the songs they perform and videos they appear in can be created using the right AI tools. However, the concept of virtual artists dates back much further than the recent rise of generative AI in the music industry. This blog series will therefore trace the historical development of virtual musicians from the 1960s to the present day, analysing the role of AI in this process.

Part 1 of the series deals with virtual artists who have not yet been created with AI tools, such as the cartoon bands The Archies and Alvin and the Chipmunks, but also computer-generated music avatars such as the Gorillaz and Kyoko Date.

Virtual Music Worlds – Part 1: A Historical Review

Virtual Cartoon Music Stars: The Archies and Alvin and the Chipmunks

On 20 September 1969, the song “Sugar, Sugar” stormed to the top of the US Billboard charts, replacing “Honkey Tonk Woman” by the Rolling Stones. This upbeat song topped the US singles charts for four weeks before finally being replaced by “I Can’t Get Next to You” by the Temptations. However, “Sugar, Sugar” was not recorded by a real pop group, but by a studio band that contributed the song to the cartoon series “The Archies Show”. “The Archies Show” was based on the Archies comics, which were created in 1941 by comic artist Bob Montana and published by John L. Goldwater.The Archies are a teenage pop band consisting of Archie Andrews (lead guitar), Reggie Mantle (guitar) and Jughead Jones (drums), who were joined by female characters Betty Cooper (tambourine) and Veronica Lodge (keyboard) and have their adventures at Riverdale High School.

Behind the project “The Archies Show” was music producer and publisher Don Kirshner, who had already celebrated chart success years earlier with the fictional rock group The Monkees. The Archies were intended to replicate the success of The Monkees. Kirshner hired successful songwriter Jeff Barry, who had written numerous Brill Building hits with his wife Ellie Greenwich in the 1960s, as producer and formed a pop band with session musicians Ron Dante (lead singer), Ron Frangipane (keyboards), Dave Appell (guitar), Chuck Rainey (bass) and Gary Chester (drums) to form a pop band behind the animated characters of The Archies, which he signed to his label Calendar Records. The 18 May 1968 issue of Billboard magazine covered Don Kirshner’s project. It announced the 17-part television series The Archies Show, produced by Filmation for CBS. The first series was broadcast on Saturday mornings from September 1968 to January 1969, reaching an audience of millions.

However, The Archies were not the first virtual musicians to appear in a television series. In 1961, Alvin and the Chipmunks made their first appearance in The Alvin Show, an animated series whose first series was aired on CBS from October 1961 to September 1962. Centre-stage are the three singing chipmunks: Alvin, Simon and Theodore Seville. They were created by singer-songwriter and music producer Ross Bagdasarian Sr., who released the song “Witch Doctor” under the stage name David Seville on the Liberty Records label in 1958. Bagdasarian sings a duet with Alvin, whose voice was created by playing a tape recording at a higher speed. This marked the birth of Alvin Seville, who later recorded other songs with his brothers, Simon and Theodore. These included the chart-topping “Chipmunk Song”, released in 1959 on the album “Let’s All Sing with the Chipmunks” on Liberty Records. This marked the beginning of a success story that continues to this day, having been crowned with numerous Grammy and Emmy awards.

The Chipmunks and the Archies were not computer-generated when they were first created. They were cartoon characters with human voices, whose songs were performed by studio musicians. However, in the sense that they owed their existence to mediation, they were already virtual and thus became the precursors of the avatars that were later created on computers and ultimately by AI.

The Gorillaz – the First Computer-generated Music Avatars

Virtual, computer-generated artists first appeared in the 1990s, when the technical capabilities to do so became available. Virtual artists achieved a new technical and economic quality with Gorillaz, whose first album, named after the band, went platinum in the United States immediately after its release in March 2001 and ultimately sold seven million copies worldwide. The Gorillaz are the result of a collaboration between the lead singer of the Britpop band Blur, Damon Albarn, and the comic book artist Jamie Hewlett, who created the main character Tank Girl in the comic book series of the same name in the late 1980s. In an interview for Wired Magazine in July 2005, Albarn and Hewlett explained how they came up with the idea for this virtual band. In 1998, they were living together in a flat in London and spent a few days watching MTV videos. Hewlett explained: “Because if you watch MTV for too long, it’s a bit like hell – there’s nothing of substance there. So we got this idea for a cartoon band, something that would be a comment on that.” For Albarn, another motive for creating Gorillaz was the opportunity to break down genre boundaries and make music that went beyond that of a British alternative rock band.

Back in 1998, Albarn and Hewlett created the four band members: lead singer Stuart Herold ‘2D’ Pot, guitarist Noodle, bassist Murdoc Niccals and drummer Russel Hobbs. The characters were intended to represent different stereotypes, and detailed biographies were created for each of them, as described in the 2006 autobiography “Rise of the Ogre”.

From the outset, the musical mastermind behind Gorillaz was Damon Albarn. He first worked alone on the virtual band’s debut album, and then with hip-hop producer Dan ‘the Automator’ Nakamura. Nakamura introduced two rappers, Kid Koala and Teren Delvon Jones (aka Del the Funky Homosapien), to the project. Musicians from a variety of genres contributed to the debut album, including Ibrahim Ferrer from the Buena Vista Social Club, Miho Hatori from the alternative rock band Cibo Matto, and Tina Weymouth from the Talking Heads. The album was released on 26 March 2001. The huge commercial success of the album and the single release “Clint Eastwood” encouraged the creators behind Gorillaz to continue with the virtual band project.

The debut album was accompanied by a worldwide concert tour, which began in London on 22 March 2001. It continued in other European cities before moving to Japan, Canada, the USA and Mexico, finally concluding in Lisbon on 22 July 2002. However, as the technology for virtual concerts did not yet exist in the early 2000s, the musicians performed behind an oversized screen onto which the animated band members and special effects were projected. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Albarn said that he enjoyed playing anonymously on stage, but acknowledged that the human element that defines a concert was lost as a result: “I enjoyed playing the first tour behind the screen. That was very obtuse of us, but highly enjoyable. But it became difficult to continue that. I think the human element of the band just demanded that we have a bit more life.”

Even before the end of their first world tour, the first steps were taken towards greater interactivity between virtual and human musicians. At the 2002 BRIT Awards, held on 22 February at Earls Court in London, Gorillaz were nominated in six categories but ultimately left empty-handed. The virtual band was the second live act to perform. A YouTube video of their performance of the hit song “Clint Eastwood” shows the four band members as 3D animations on four giant video walls and was a sensation in the early 2000s. In the frenetic applause from the audience, Russell Hobbs opened the song with his drum beats, immediately joined by Murdoc Niccals and Noodle on bass and guitar, allowing 2D, voiced by Damon Albarn, to kick off with the distinctive cry of “Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo…” and continue with the fatalistic lyrics “I ain’t happy, I’m feeling glad. I got sunshine in a bag”. After about 1 minute and 20 seconds, rapper Phi Life Cypher appeared on stage with another rapper to perform together with the 3D avatars. The coordination between the human performers and the virtual musicians was perfect and clearly impressed the audience, who burst into thunderous applause at the end of the performance. The effort that went into it was also impressive. The BBC reported that the band’s approximately 4-minute 3D performance is said to have cost around GBP 300,000.

As Damon Albarn returned to Blur in 2003 to promote their seventh studio album, “Think Tank,” with a world tour, the Gorillaz project was temporarily put on hold. However, in 2004, Albarn and Hewlett renewed their collaboration, commissioning DJ Danger Mouse — who had caused a stir in the media and sparked copyright disputes with his mash-up production, “The Grey Album” — to produce the second Gorillaz album, “Demon Days”. Once again, they collaborated with several well-known artists, including Neneh Cherry, Martina Topley-Bird, Roots Manuva, Ike Turner, and actor Dennis Hopper, who was a narrator. However, their most famous collaboration was with the US rap duo De La Soul, who contributed the chart-topping hit “Feel Good Inc.” to the album. “Demon Days” stormed to the top of the UK album charts and remained in the charts for an impressive 78 weeks. In the US Billboard charts, “Demon Days” climbed to number six and remained in the Billboard 200 for 73 weeks.De La Soul also performed at the “Demon Days Live Performances”, held at the Manchester Opera House from 1 to 5 November 2005, and repeated at the Apollo Theatre in New York City in April of the same year. This time, the live band performed on stage, but with only their silhouettes visible thanks to lighting effects, allowing the video projections in the background to capture the audience’s attention, as can be seen on the DVD “Demon Days: Live at the Manchester Opera House,” released later.

However, the lack of 3D animations of the band members was unsatisfactory, so a technology was sought that would enable the avatars to perform live. The EyeLine technology from the British company Musion 3D was used, which could be used to produce computer-generated holograms. In this way, Gorillaz were projected onto the stage at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2005 in Lisbon on 3 November 2005 to perform “Feel Good Inc.” with the support of rap duo De La Soul. The experiment was repeated a few months later at the 48^th Grammy Awards ceremony on 8 February 2006 at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles, but with the addition of US pop diva Madonna, who first performed her hit “Hung Up” as a hologram alongside the Gorillaz and then in the flesh on stage.

In an interview with US radio station Hot 97, however, Damon Albarn expressed his disappointment with the hologram technology used at the MTV Europe and Grammy Music Awards. In conversation with the programme’s presenter, he criticised the fact that the volume of the performance had to be reduced so as not to interfere with the projection: “They started and it was so quiet cause they’ve got this piece of film that you’ve got to pull over the stage so any bass frequencies would just mess up the illusion completely.” At that time, hologram technology had not yet been fully developed, and implementing it was associated with considerable technical difficulties and costs. This is why the plan for a Gorillaz live tour in 2007/08 was cancelled.

Despite these setbacks, Damon Albarn tried to keep the Gorillaz project alive. In March 2010, Gorillaz’s third studio album, “Plastic Beach”, was released and promoted through the live tour “Escape to the Plastic Beach”. After a lengthy break, the album “Humanz” followed in April 2017, sending Gorillaz back on tour. In both cases, 3D animations and hologram technology were dispensed with in favour of the well-established “Demon Days” concept, with the live band performing at the forefront and visuals and 2D animations of the band displayed on a screen behind them.

The next project, “Song Machine”, which was launched at the end of January 2020, also did not attempt to bring the Gorillaz characters to life as AI-generated avatars. Instead of a classic album, “Song Machine” saw nine episodes of a music video web series produced by London-based Kong Studios uploaded between 30 January and 24 December 2020. In each episode, guest musicians performed the new songs with Gorillaz, which ultimately resulted in a virtual album. Virtual reality was only created insofar as augmented reality was used in three virtual live gigs broadcast worldwide in December 2020.

“Song Machine” was certainly an innovative way to release music and received an additional boost from the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was not a significant step towards AI-generated virtual artists. In this regard, it was therefore primarily left to companies in South Korea and Japan to take the lead.

Virtual Music Idols from the Far East: Kyoko Date and Cyber Singer Adam

Japanese and South Korean companies were already experimenting with computer-animated musician avatars in the 1990s. In 1996, the appearance of Kyoko Date attracted international attention. She was the first virtual idol who could sing and dance but, unlike human idols, was available around the clock, did not age and could not cause scandals. Kyoko Date was developed by the Japanese talent agency Horipro, which had previously supplied talent to the thriving Japanese pop idol industry. In an interview, Horipro CEO Yoshitaka Hori, son of company founder Takeo Hori, who started the business in Tokyo in 1960, predicted that the music TV stations that were springing up like mushrooms in the mid-1990s would need new content that they could not fill with human stars. Virtual artists would therefore be needed to fill the demand gap.

Kyoko Date was therefore constructed precisely according to the ideal image of a teen star at that time. The Tokyo-based Visual Science Laboratory developed the computer-animated avatar under the project name DK 96, where DK stood for Digital Kids. The avatar was given the human voice of a singer signed to Horipro. The Los Angeles-based company Three Space Imagery (TSi) was responsible for Kyoko Date’s dance performances, as it was one of the few companies worldwide using the completely new motion capture technology for computer animation at the time. Kyoko Date’s virtual persona was completed with a personal website containing her “biography”. According to this, she was 17 years old, from Tokyo, and had worked in a hamburger kiosk before being discovered by the music industry. Originally, she had wanted to become a private detective, and her greatest wish had been to meet US President Bill Clinton in person – that was before “Monica-Gate” dominated the international headlines.

A huge amount of effort went into creating Kyoko Date. In addition to ten employees from the talent agency, fifty computer technicians spent eighteen months designing the avatar. It is said that perfecting the lip synchronisation alone took six months. Technical difficulties also delayed the schedule. Back in May 1996, Horipro launched an international PR campaign to announce Kyoko Date. As the computer animation was not yet functioning sufficiently well, Kyoko Date first appeared on a Tokyo FM radio show in October 1996. A music and dance video featuring Kyoko Date was not shown on the Japanese channel TBS Television until 2 November 1996, in which the virtual artist also gave an interview. This was intended to boost sales of Date’s debut single, “Love Communication”, released on 21 November. However, disappointing sales of only 30,000 CD singles worldwide did not justify the production costs of several million US dollars. A second single entitled “Touch”, released in July 1997, sold even worse, and so the project of a virtual pop idol had to be considered a failure.

In the years that followed, Horipro repeatedly attempted to revive Kyoko Date’s career. In 1999, she was repositioned in South Korea under the new stage name DiKi with the single “Between,” but this effort came to nothing. In 2001, Kyoko Date was given a new design and became the digital ambassador for the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry under the name DK 2001. She was even given a daughter named Kaori Date, but this also failed. Her appearance as a host in the video game “Second Life” in 2007 was also unsuccessful, and she disappeared into obscurity just like the game.

Cyber singer Adam, developed in 1997 by South Korean software company Adamsoft, suffered a similar fate. On 23 January 1998, Adam made his debut with the song “No Love in the World”, which was also reported on by public television in South Korea. Similar to Kyoto Date, Adam was given a biography stating that he was born on 12 December 1977 in Eden, South Korea. He was 178 cm tall, weighed 68 kg, wore contact lenses and was said to be modelled on Korean film star Song Seung-heon. Since AI-generated voice clones did not yet exist in the late 1990s, South Korean singer Park Sung-chul lent Adam his voice, which he also used to record the first album, “Genesis”, released by YPC Records in 1998. Remarkably successful, with 200,000 units sold, the debut album prompted Adamsoft to announce a second album, “Adam 2: Exodus”, in June 1999. As with the first album, Park Seong-cheol was the actual performer, but the second album sold significantly worse than the first, and so the avatar project was discontinued due to high costs. Rumours were spread in public that Adam had to do his military service or had died of a viral infection.

Although cyber singer Adam did not enjoy lasting success, he can still be considered a co-founder of K-pop, a genre that emerged in the 1990s. Although Kyoko Date and Adam were one-hit wonders, they paved the way for the next generation of music avatars who were created by AI technology.

Endnotes

Fred Bronson, 2003, The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, updated and expanded 5^th edition, New York: Billboard Books, p 258.

Wikipedia, “The Archies”, version of July 11, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-13.

Ken Emerson, 2005, Always Magic in the Air. The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era, New York: Viking, pp 257-258.

Ibid.

Billboard, “Kirshner Channeling Archies To A TV-Disk Launching Pad”, 18. Mai 1968, online bei Google Books verfügbar, accessed: 2025-08-13.

Wikipedia, “The Archie Show”, version of June 28, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-13.

Wikipedia, “The Alvin Show”, version of July 27, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-13.

Fred Bronson, 2003, The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, updated and expanded 5^th edition, New York: Billboard Books, p 47.

Allmusic, “Gorillaz Biography” by Heather Phares, n.d., accessed: 2025-08-14.

Wired, “Keeping It (Un)real”, Issue 13.07 – July 2005, accessed: 2025-08-14.

Q Magazine, “Gorillaz Interview”, April 10, 2017, accessed: 2025-08-14.

Cass Browne & Damon Albarn, 2006, Rise of the Ogre, London: Michael Joseph Ltd.

Allmusic, “Gorillaz Biography” by Heather Phares, n.d., accessed: 2025-08-14.

Wikipedia, “Clint Eastwood (song)”, version of August 12, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-14.

Entertainment Weekly, “Gorillaz creators Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett on the cartoon band’s past, present, and future: The Music Mix Q&A”, June 4, 2010, accessed: 2025-08-14.

YouTube, “Gorillaz – Clint Eastwood (Live BRITs Performance)”, January, 16. 2010, accessed: 2025-08-14.

BBC News, “Brits get under way”, February 20, 2002, accessed: 2025-08-14.

Wikipedia, “Think Tank (Blur Album)”, version of May 3, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-14.

Wikipedia, “Demon Days”, version of August 7, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-14.

Ibid.

The entire DVD can also be streamed in HD quality on YouTube, “Gorillaz Demon Days Live at Manchester Opera House (Full Show)”, January 6, 2021, accessed: 2025-08-14.

YouTube, “Gorillaz – Feel Good Inc. (Live At The MTV EMA’s)”, January 16. 2010, accessed: 2025-08-14.

YouTube, “Gorillaz and Madonna – 2006 Grammy Awards”, October 15, 2010, accessed: 2025-08-14.

YouTube, “Gorillaz Share The Secret Behind Their Animations, Friction & New Album”, April 28, 2017, accessed: 2025-08-14.

Wikipedia, “Escape to Plastic Beach Tour”, version of April 25, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-14.

In February 2018, during a tour break, Damon Albarn produced Gorillaz’s sixth studio album, “The Now Now”, which was released in June of that year. From that point on, the “Humanz” tour was renamed “The Now Now” tour to promote the new album. See Wikipedia, “Humanz Tour”, version of June 29, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-14 and Wikipedia “The Now Now Tour”, version of February 19, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-14.

Wikipedia “Song Machine”, version of June 6, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-14.

YouTube, “First virtual Japanese Pop Idol – Kyoko Date (1997)”, May 28, 2015, accessed: 2025-08-19.

A short documentary on Kyoko Date’s creation can be found on YouTube, “Kyoko Date, the First Virtual Idol”, March 7, 2021, accessed: 2025-08-19.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

KBS News, “The birth of the first cyber singer”, January, 23, 1998, translated from Korean with DeepL, accessed: 2025-08-19.

Namuwiki, “Cyber Singer Adam”, version of August 11, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-19.

Discogs, “Adam – Genesis”, n.d., accessed: 2025-08-19.

Discogs, “Adam – Exodus”, n.d., accessed: 2025-08-19.

Namuwiki, “Cyber Singer Adam”, version of August 11, 2025, accessed: 2025-08-19.