Spirit had it right in 1970.
So far the message hasn’t quite taken hold.
I’ve mentioned before how Coldplay was the first band to set a goal of cutting their tour’s carbon footprint by 50%. According to their latest update, they’ve cut their emissions by 59% in the last two years, compared to their previous tour, through reducing air travel and even using a power-generating dancefloor: similar to that of a concert venue I reported on a few months ago in Glasgow, Scotland, that’s heated and cooled using the stored body heat of concertgoers.
It’s time for an update, though, because there are a lot more efforts afoot to curb the emissions from the music industry and call for climate action at a broader level. This week, the whole newsletter focuses on the music industry – the good news, the not-so-good news, and my top inspiration. Read on!
Music Declares Emergency is a UK-based charity that counts performers from Billie Eilish and Radiohead to the London Symphony Orchestra and Julian Lloyd Webber among its activists. (Did you catch the Instagram Live I did with Billie’s mom a few weeks ago, and the live-streamed Overheated event they’re hosting next week?) MDE has a new campaign titled No Music on a Dead Planet to “bring together artists, music industry professionals and music fans to call for an immediate governmental response to the climate change emergency to protect all life on Earth.”
To facilitate climate action within the industry, MDE has created climate info packs with practical steps the music sector can take to shrink its carbon footprint, from planning efficient tour routes with multiple stops in the same country or even the same city, to greening their banks and switching to a renewable energy provider. For fans, they’ve teamed up with the The ClimateMusic Project to create the BeCool campaign that focuses on civic engagement, emission reductions, and climate education.
Individual artists also understand the enormity of this problem and the importance of catalyzing climate action. The band Massive Attack worked with climate scientists at the UK’s Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research and A Greener Future , a nonprofit focused on lowering the emissions of the music industry, to create the gold standard for green touring. They highlighted that work at an August show at Clifton Downs in Bristol, England. The venue was powered by renewable energy, serviced by electric vehicles, catered with vegan food, and even featured composting toilets. The band also encouraged fans to use sustainable ways of traveling to the show, including electric shuttle busses that ferried concertgoers from the center of Bristol to the festival grounds.
At Climate Week in New York last month, Björk premiered a new film, Cornucopia, that focuses on her work around the climate crisis. A group of K-pop fans called Kpop4Planet convinced Hyundai Motor Co. to scuttle a deal to buy aluminum created using coal power in Indonesia. For more on what individual artists are doing, read this interview with Grammy-nominated producer Jayda G and rapper and zoologist Louis VI.
It’s clear that a growing number of musicians — and their fans — recognize the power of their voice, and are using it to call for change!
Some real change has already been achieved. In 2023, for the first time, the long-running Glastonbury Festival in the United Kingdom was powered solely by fossil-fuel-free energy, using a combination of renewable electricity, solar photovoltaic and battery hybrid systems, as well as generators powered by fuel derived from waste vegetable oil. In June 2024, Coldplay announced that direct emissions from its current world tour were almost 60% lower than those of its 2016–17 stadium tour, with 18 shows powered entirely by portable battery systems and 72% of all waste diverted from landfill.
Historically, music has played a key part in social movements. The industry now has the chance to be a role model for real change — and audiences are receptive. In a survey of 350,000 live music fans across the United States, 72% said climate change is an important issue and 70% did not oppose artists speaking out about it (see go.nature.com/474sh69). And a 2022 report by researchers at the University of Glasgow, UK, found that music fans are more likely to care about climate change than are non-music fans (see go.nature.com/3x9drao).
Some might say that live music is, by its nature, unsustainable, and that the best solution would be for performers to stop touring altogether. But that is a joyless answer — and there is an alternative. Richard Betts, a meteorologist and climate scientist at the University of Exeter, UK, thinks that change will come only when it is driven by those highest up in the music industry and backed by good science. Now is the time to be vocal.