A Roy Orbison who died in 1988 goes on tour in 2018, projected onto a scrim, backed by a live orchestra, in venues the living man did not fill at the end.

The reviews are respectful and slightly frightened. The audience is not frightened. The audience knows exactly what it has bought and is having a good time, which the reviewers find more unsettling than the technology.

Meanwhile there are four Australian Pink Floyds, and at least one of them has played to more people than the fourth-largest year of the actual band, and the sound engineers on those tours are, in several documented cases, the same men.

Ask which one is the tribute. The living members have not performed that set in forty years; the tribute performs it four nights a week and is therefore, by any operational test — fidelity to the recording, consistency, availability, the correct number of notes in the correct order — the superior instance.

The original band is now a group of men who once, briefly, resembled the thing that all of these are copies of. They were the first tribute act. They had no advantage except priority, and priority is a fact about calendars.