A Charlie Daniels hologram is set to perform at a Fourth of July concert at Fort Campbell military base in Kentucky. The announcement came this week from Daniels’ son, framing it as a fitting tribute for the United States’ 250th anniversary. It is the latest in a growing line of deceased or retired artists who have been resurrected as digital projections for paying audiences, and it raises questions the music industry has been avoiding having properly for more than a decade.

The hologram concert is not a new idea. The Tupac hologram at Coachella 2012 is usually cited as the moment the concept went mainstream, though it was technically a Pepper’s Ghost illusion rather than true holography. The footage was startling, the crowd response was real, and the entertainment industry filed it away as a thing that could be done again. It took a while for the infrastructure to catch up to the promise.

Now the infrastructure is there. ABBA’s Voyage residency in London, running since 2021 and still selling tickets in 2026, uses motion capture, CGI, and a purpose-built arena to present digital versions of the band as they appeared in 1979. It is not quite a hologram in the strict sense, but it is something more ambitious: a fully immersive production designed to make audiences believe they are watching something real. It has been, by any measure, a commercial and critical success.

Elvis Presley’s estate has taken a different approach with “Elvis Evolution,” an AI and holographic projection show that premiered in London in 2024 and is expanding to Las Vegas, Tokyo, and Berlin. The digital Elvis was built from thousands of archival photographs and home footage. Live actors and musicians fill out the production. The show is described as immersive and, by most accounts that have come back, surprisingly affecting.

What is interesting about both of these productions is that they are honest about what they are. They do not pretend the artist is alive. The framing is theatrical, not deceptive. ABBA Voyage works in part because the band participated in creating their own avatars, lending the production a consent and intentionality that retroactive holograms can’t quite claim.

The Charlie Daniels project belongs to a different category. Daniels died in 2020. He did not consent to being digitally resurrected. His son is making the call on behalf of his estate. This is legal, and it may even be what Daniels would have wanted, but it is worth noting the difference between an artist choosing to participate in their own digital afterlife and heirs making that choice posthumously.

The question of consent matters because it sets a precedent. If estates can license hologram performances without any real scrutiny, the door opens to productions that don’t reflect the artist’s values or wishes. What happens when a hologram of a dead artist is asked to perform at an event the living version would never have touched? The legal frameworks for this are still being built, and the music industry is moving faster than the law.

There is also a simpler question about what these performances are for. The ABBA and Elvis productions work as spectacle and as tribute. But there is a risk, as the technology becomes cheaper and more available, that hologram concerts become a way to extract revenue from dead artists without the friction of living ones. No touring demands, no creative control battles, no bad behavior in the press. Just a digital likeness doing exactly what the estate decides it should do.

The technology itself is genuinely impressive. Volumetric video, motion capture, AI vocal synthesis, and electro-holographic projection have all improved substantially in the past five years. What was uncanny and slightly creepy in 2012 can now be rendered with a realism that is harder to dismiss. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does raise the stakes for how the industry decides to use it.

The Charlie Daniels show at Fort Campbell will attract an audience that wants to see him, or something like him, one more time. That impulse is understandable. Grief is real, and so is nostalgia, and live performance has always been about the feeling of presence rather than the fact of it. But as these productions multiply, the music industry needs to think more carefully about the difference between honoring an artist’s legacy and monetizing their image in ways that extract value without accountability.

The answer is not to ban hologram concerts. The ABBA and Elvis shows demonstrate that they can be done well, with care and intention. The answer is to build norms around them before the market does it instead. Because the market, left to itself, will always find the cheapest version of any idea.