Soda Stereo returns projecting a musician who died 12 years ago

On March 21, 2026, Charly Alberti and Zeta Bosio went up to the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires next to screens that reproduced the voice and guitar of the deceased third vertex of the Soda Stereo triangle, Gustavo Cerati. They showed previous recordings of the musician, and they intended to go far beyond a simple hologram. A part of the public, from social networks, did not see it as something so revolutionary. What just happened with Soda Stereo is one more chapter (although, a particularly revealing one) in the industrialization of the posthumous concert.

The ghost of Cerati. It was known when and where Soda Stereo returned, but it was not known how. On September 29, 2025, the announcement on networks was brief and deliberately ambiguous: “It is not a tribute. It is not a tribute. It is not a movie. It is Soda, live. Soda = Avant-garde.” The promise was that Gustavo Cerati, who died in 2014, would be on stage, although the word “hologram” was carefully avoided in the announcement. What the public found on March 21 at the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires was something simpler and more complex at the same time: screens, depth effects and the voice and guitar recordings that Cerati left on the 1997 and 2007 tours.

The figures. The tour already has, before finishing its first week, more than 500,000 tickets sold and 33 dates in Latin America and Spain, the last scheduled for September 24 in Madrid. What can be seen in the show is, behind a semi-transparent curtain, Cerati’s silhouette that gives way, song by song, to a clearer presence on the side screens: shots of his hands on the blue Jackson guitar, full-length images… A total of nineteen songs, with 3D glasses for two of them.

Fan reaction. The reaction on networks was very polarized. A part of the audience was moved but another part, the loudest, described the show as “fraud” and “fantochada”. The argument for rejection, more than technical, was emotional: “Cerati always changed some arrangement live, made jokes, talked to the audience. “That’s not Cerati, it’s not live, it has no humanity.” pointed out a user. “Cerati” and “fraud” became trending topics among reviews of “the “technological prowess” is normalized by the third song. And then there is nothing left. It is one song after another (sometimes they are not even on stage). And the viewer feels as if they were watching a DVD with 15 thousand other people.”

Everything to the millimeter. In the review he made The Nation of the concert, he said that the show “is not a recital. It is a show, calculated to the millimeter, with a script, without possibilities of spontaneity or improvisation.” And it is something that can be applied to what most great live concerts have become: every gesture of the artist, every speech between songs is extremely scripted. But in the case of Cerati, even more spontaneous moments (there is a moment in which he greets the other two members with “Hello, Zeta, Charly…”) are especially artificial, because they will always be repeated the same.

Funeral precedents. This is not the first time that the music industry has resorted to this type of resources. When Tupac Shakur’s image appeared on the Coachella stage alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre in April 2012, the 90,000 attendees were left speechless. The video racked up 15 million views on YouTube in 48 hours and sales of the rapper’s catalog skyrocketed. Technically it was not a hologram, but an old trick from 19th century illusionism: a projection on a screen in front of the audience known as Pepper’s Ghost.

Since then, spectral versions of Michael Jackson, Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston and Frank Zappa have graced the stage. They were all isolated events: the first time it was thought about extending it over time was the ABBA Voyage show in 2022: a permanent residence in London with a 3,000-seat venue built specifically for the show, with effects from Industrial Light & Magic and with the four members of the group actively participating in the motion capture process. ABBA Voyage had a turnover of more than one hundred million pounds in 2024 alone.

Something more modest. The Soda Stereo show is inspired by the ABBA model, but in a reduced version, since the technology used is significantly more modest. There is an extra difference: ABBA Voyage works because its four members consciously decided how they wanted to be represented. With Soda Stereo, Cerati did not make any decisions about this project. Consent is exercised by whoever controls his image: Benito Cerati, son of the musician, who has defended the Soda Stereo initiative. The problem is that, according to fansCerati was known for exactly the opposite of this: improvisation, stage risk and unpredictability were always present in his concerts.

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