The music industry is not known for sustainability. Plastic records, energy to stream and download digital music, studio recording, and, of course, the big one – touring. However, many artists in the industry are taking a step forward and trying to shake up the industry. Or at least make it more green-compliant.
As mentioned, the biggest issue of sustainability is touring. And it’s not just about the band jumping on a private plane to the next city on the band’s tour. Shipping musical equipment, recording devices, entourages, technicians, dancers, marketing materials and merchandise, staging, lights, speakers and sound boards, and single-use plastics at venues create massive carbon footprints.
The music industry is trying to combat this issue by advising artists to travel as efficiently as possible. To perform concerts in localized clusters as opposed to jetting around the world. To endorse reusable merchandise and encourage social impact/charity donations within their ticket prices. And to create strategies for recycling and assessing materials used for staging and energy inputs.
But there are many artists themselves who have taken sustainability into their own hands with the leader of the movement being Coldplay. When the band released their album Everyday Life in 2019, lead singer Chris Martin wowed the world when he announced the band wasn’t touring for the album. Instead, they were going to take the time and work out how to tour sustainably. He promised that when they did next embark, the band would do so much more green.
The band came back in 2022 to kick off their Music of the Spheres tour and started to fulfill their mission. The first two years of the tour saw a 59% reduction in CO emissions compared with their previous tours. Currently, 72% of tour waste has been diverted from landfills and sent for reuse, recycling and composting, which is up from 66% last year. Each subsequent year of the tour, its sustainability component performs better. How have they accomplished that?
They added in-venue solar installations, kinetic dance floors, and energy-storing stationary bikes to the arena and encouraged fans to help power the show as they danced and spun. Each dance floor holds dozens of people, and each of the bikes generates an average of 200 watts of energy, captured in batteries to run elements of the show. The band has said the produced energy is enough to power one of the smaller stage areas each night and provide the crew with phone, laptop, and tool-charging stations. (Coldplay has said the figures have been assessed and verified by the environmental solutions initiative at MIT.)
Coldplay has also minimized their air travel — when flights are necessary, the band opts for commercial over charter — and uses trains and electric vehicles whenever possible. Tour trucks use alternative fuels like hydrotreated vegetable oil.
Martin has said that Coldplay are not advocates. They just want to prove that touring this way makes business sense. In an interview with the BBC (12/23), he said, “At the end of the day, for a lot of people, that’s their primary consideration in every wealth bracket, so we’re really trying to show on this tour that being clean and green isn’t some charitable left-wing wishy-washy thing. It’s like, no, this is the best business sense too.”
It’s not just Coldplay bending straight lines. Massive Attack partnered with Manchester’s Tyndall Centre in the U.K., a STEM research community, to review the sources of carbon emissions from their touring schedule. The result is that the band now travels by train to reach their tour stops. Billy Eilish has pledged to eliminate an estimated 35,000 single-use water bottles from her tour and only serve vegetarian food backstage. Her recently released album, Hit Me Hard And Soft, is on recycled and eco-vinyl, with all the packaging made from recycled materials. Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour merchandise is sustainably dyed and 100 percent organic cotton. Shawn Mendes has pledged to reduce his tour’s environmental impact and emissions by 50 percent per show, employing sustainable fabrics in tour hoodies and T-shirts, staying at hotels that commit to net zero emissions, eliminating plastic, and using sustainable aviation fuel.
The challenge, however, remains for smaller artists. While those above have a devout following, smaller and new artists do not. They need to rely more heavily on touring to promote their identity, music and latest records. For them, the balance between sustainability and successful outcomes of touring is a more difficult balance. It’s a space that they need to negotiate wisely.
To make the music industry completely sustainable is impossible. Increasing its percentages will be a Herculean feat. Actually, Herculean x2. But small steps are happening. And small steps lead to larger ones.
