Since 2019, that slogan has been a rallying cry for the music industry. It’s been amplified by major artists like Billie Eilish, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Thom Yorke of Radiohead, who’ve worn or designed shirts with those apocalyptic words. It’s shown up on the backdrops of arena tours, on award-show red carpets, on album compilations and playlists.

The catchphrase is part of a campaign by the global non-profit organization Music Declares Emergency (MDE), which has gathered big-name musicians across the world to pledge action in the face of the climate crisis.

But as festivals are cancelled because of wildfires, bands are forced to reroute tours because of road floodings, and large outdoor concerts become major risks for heat stroke, the music industry is starting to wake up to urgent omens. More than just a fashion statement, the sector’s eco-enthusiasm has to come with concrete, identifiable actions. They have to do it together – not just the musicians onstage, but also promoters, labels, record manufacturers, merchandisers, concert promoters and record labels. And they have to do it quickly.

Late last year, in the wake of COP26, the U.K.’s Association of Independent Music launched the Music Climate Pact, which was signed by all three major labels – Universal, Warner and Sony – along with large indies like Secretly Group and Ninja Tune. Agreeing to work collectively, the pact includes a commitment from each signatory to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050 and achieve a 50% reduction by 2030.

For an industry with many interlocking stakeholders, one that relies on vast amounts of energy-intensive manufacturing, streaming and travel, the challenge is figuring out how to meet their agreed-upon targets.

“Being green and sustainable is a shared value for a lot of people in the music industry, but no one really knows how to do it,” says Ben Swanson, co-founder of the Bloomington, Indiana–based record label Secretly Canadian and Secretly Group, which also represents other large American indie labels, including Jagjaguwar, Numero Group and Dead Oceans. “In terms of implementation, it’s still a relatively new concept.”

Swanson and his colleagues at Secretly Canadian have tried various eco-conscious initiatives over the years, including minimizing product packaging and avoiding pressing more CDs and records than they can sell (with some “missteps,” Swanson admits), but always wanted to be more strategic and intentional about it.

So, last year, on the label’s 25th anniversary, they hired climate consultant Jen Cregar of Terra Lumina and published an official Sustainability Plan. In it, they calculated their actual carbon footprint (116 MTCO2e, or metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, in 2021) and pledged to become “carbon negative” by their 30th anniversary in 2026 – a more ambitious goal than the Music Climate Pact that they also signed.

Swanson admits it won’t be a perfect estimate, but keeping track and staying transparent about the numbers will make it easier to improve upon them, both for themselves and for others following in their footsteps.

As an example, he points to Big Time, the 2022 album by singer/songwriter Angel Olsen. Aiming to create a carbon-negative album release, they calculated the “cradle-to-grave” carbon impact of both a CD and vinyl LP from manufacturing to shipping, from its life in a fan’s stereo to its likely afterlife in a landfill 100 years from now. With a quantifiable number, they then built in the price of carbon offsets supporting the Medford Spring Grassland Conservation Project in Bent County, Colorado. Offsetting is an inexact science, Swanson admits, and it’s not as sustainable as avoiding the output in the first place, but it creates a replicable – and improvable – template for future releases for both their label and others.

“Being green is a shared value for a lot of people in the music industry, but no one really knows how to do it.”

—Ben Swanson, Secretly Group

Secretly Group was part of a panel at the Canadian Music Climate Summit in Toronto earlier this fall about labels and sustainability. Organized by the Canadian wing of MDE, the summit was a daylong conference and concert ahead of November’s COP27 in Egypt. With panels about green touring and concerts, the role of artists, funding and diversity, and a keynote by David Suzuki, it was intended to give musicians the tools to take actions in their own practices – something they are often reluctant to do for fear of being labelled hypocrites, given their touring lifestyles.

But, more importantly, it was an attempt to get the “right people in the room,” says organizer and climate activist Kim Fry. “The musicians, for the most part, are on board,” she says. “It’s the labels, the managers, the tour managers, the venues.”

She knows from experience through her daughter, Brighid Fry, one of the co-founders of MDE Canada. Her folk-rock duo, Housewife (formerly Moscow Apartment), has made sustainability an integral part of their practice. But as an emerging act, one led by two 20-year-old women, they don’t have the power to enact big, sweeping change on a structural level. They’re using the power they do have, though, especially when it comes to advocacy. Last year, Brighid co-authored an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and this year she’s written a similar one directed at the decision-makers behind the scenes in the music industry, asking them to use their power for climate action.

“I just don’t think there’s really an excuse [not to],” she says. “Because if the people on the public side of the industry want it and the audiences want it, then why isn’t it being followed through behind the scenes?”

As an artist, she can do things like using green riders – asking for sustainable options like refillable water options both front- and backstage and strongly encouraging venues to use renewable energy. She can negotiate a sustainability clause into her record contract. She can work with T-shirt makers that use water-based ink and closed-loop manufacturing. All are recommendations within MDE’s Music Industry Climate Pack, which offers 10 steps for sustainability for artists, venues, merch, labels, touring and fans. But if the venues, promoters, engineers, labels, lawyers, audiences and multinational corporations don’t cooperate, there’s only so much performers can do.

While major pop stars can afford to rent or buy electric tour buses and fight against radius clauses that restrict playing multiple shows in one market, it’s harder and costlier for smaller acts. And those major acts carry a much larger carbon footprint. After being identified as a band with one of the biggest carbon footprints, the members of Coldplay paused touring in 2019 until they could work out how their tour “can not only be sustainable [but] how can it be actively beneficial.” Earlier this year Coldplay announced that its air travel would be powered by green jet fuel but was then accused of greenwashing for partnering with Neste, whose controversial “sustainable aviation fuel” might not be entirely green.

Even if a stadium act takes an electric bus to a concert, they also have to account for the travel of the tens and hundreds of thousands of fans to get there. (Some have encouraged fans with contests, discounts and other initiatives to carpool or take public transit.)

Building on work done by British organization Julie’s Bicycle over the last decade, the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts recently launched Creative Green Tools Canada – a free and user-friendly interface to calculate the carbon footprint of a tour, concert or festival. Devon Hardy, the program’s director, says she hopes it normalizes tracking emissions for music events. “Even just the act of collecting that data can make folks more aware of their behaviours and start changing them,” she writes in an email.

One of the goals of the Toronto Music Climate Summit was to make people aware of tools like these, says Kim Fry. Many in the Canadian music industry don’t look beyond the usual arts funders such as SOCAN to realize there is money available from the federal government for green initiatives. The Ministry of Transportation’s Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program, for instance, has funding that could be used for tour travel.

In general, Canada is lagging behind other countries like the U.K., Australia and even the U.S. when it comes to sustainability in the music industry, Fry argues. There are a few potential reasons for that. Touring is harder in Canada because it’s so geographically spread out. The industry is small and slow to change. And many of the major events and award shows are sponsored by Canada’s big banks, which are some of the largest investors in carbon-burning oil and gas projects.

“If the music industry thinks it’s immune to the impacts of climate, it’s so naive,” she says. “We want them to understand the severity of the emergency we’re all facing.”

Richard Trapunski is the former associate music editor at Toronto’s NOW Magazine and reports on culture and business for various publications.

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But that’s starting to change.

In past years, for example, the aftermath of the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival has resembled a poorly managed garbage dump—thanks in no small part to an estimated 1.3 million single-use plastic bottles sold during the five-day event.

Yet 2019 will be different. When the festival comes around again in June, such bottles will be banned, according to a recent announcement. It’s part of a larger “greening” trend in the music industry, especially a push to ditch single-use plastics. And though that can’t solve the problem of plastic choking the world’s oceans—roughly half of which comes from abandoned fishing equipment—it has real benefits, experts say, including some unexpected ones.

Last year the U.S.-based Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, announced that it would be banning plastic straws from all 45 of its American concert venues. A number of other music festivals also banned straws, including Coachella and Montreal’s Osheaga. Sixty-one U.K. music festivals have banned the sale of glitter, because it’s made of tiny microplastic particles that end up contaminating watersheds downstream from shower drains.

And REVERB.org, a non-profit that works with some of North America’s biggest music tours to make them more environmentally friendly, has just launched a new partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme for a concerted anti-plastic campaign.

Among many other greening initiatives, which the group says have amounted to a 120,000-ton reduction in carbon emissions, Reverb has a longstanding program to ban single-use plastic bottles backstage among artists and crew. Through its #RockNRefill campaign, Reverb provides free filtered water and branded reusable bottles by donation. Now it will also be inviting concertgoers to sign on to some or all of the waste-reducing measures in the UN’s #CleanSeas pledge, such as giving up plastic straws, trading plastic bags for tote bags, and choosing reusable water bottles, mugs, and takeout containers.

Jennifer Lynes, co-founder of the Sustainable Concert Working Group, which encourages environmental sustainability in the music industry, said there are several drivers of this trend.

Concerts are major money-makers in the music biz these days. Record sales aren’t what they once were, to say the least—and many events have become huge and elaborate, said Lynes, who is also a professor in the school of environment, enterprise and development at the University of Waterloo. More complexity means more waste, an issue that has become more acute lately as the troubled global recycling system has prevented polluters from exporting as much plastic trash to China as they used to.

Larger concerts also mean larger potential impacts. According to a 2015 report from the think tank Powerful Thinking, the U.K.’s 279 summer music festivals are responsible for 20,000 metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions every year—100,000, including audience travel. They also produce 23,500 tonnes of waste, of which less than a third is recycled.

Given how important touring has become to artists, giving it up isn’t in the cards. Carbon offsetting has taken off as an alternative. The San Fran-based rock band Third Eye Blind is planning to counter the effects of its 35-city 2019 tour, including a portion of audience travel, by buying certified carbon offsets from U.S.-based ClimeCo. ClimeCo also offset 3,500 tons of carbon dioxide from Pearl Jam’s 2018 tour.

This speaks to another factor driving the greening trend: leadership from environmentally-minded artists, such as Hawaiian singer-songwriter Jack Johnson.

Johnson’s EnviroRider agreement, which has been in place in various forms since 2005, demands the venues where he performs follow stringent waste reduction, recycling, and carbon offsetting guidelines.

“What (Johnson) has found is that venues will sometimes do this for him, and then say, ‘Well it wasn’t that hard. Why can’t we do it all the time?’” Lynes said.

It’s true, said Tanner Watt, director of partnerships and development at Reverb. It’s no longer just the usual suspects, like Johnson, on the anti-plastic train. Reverb will be working with some of the world’s top pop acts this summer, including Pink and Fleetwood Mac.

Watt conceded that reducing single-use plastics is “low-hanging fruit” as far as environmental impacts of the music industry are concerned. Plastic poses a simple problem with fairly simple solutions that resonate with music fans—especially young ones.

“There’s all this political frustration, and all this easy access to photo and video to see negative issues up close. Young people are excited about (reducing plastic) – but even more than that, they’re excited to say they are being part of that,” he said.

While measures like the #CleanSeas pledge might seem largely symbolic, the anti-plastic campaign doesn’t amount to greenwashing, said Michèle Paulin, a professor at Concordia University who studies corporate marketing from a moral and ethical perspective.

“We start somewhere,” she said. “We understand there are big issues—but big issues like plastic in the ocean have to be dealt with using big resources.”

A measure like replacing single-use water bottles with reusable ones and refilling stations has virtuous knock-on effects, Paulin added. Cutting down on waste helps reduce the indirect costs for municipalities that want to host big events.

And it helps trigger a subtle, positive set of changes in people’s mindsets. Filling up water bottles gets people thinking about the bigger picture, Paulin said. We’ve banned plastic water bottles at festivals—why not entire cities? Next thing you know, your local community is having a conversation about protecting water as a public resource.

At least, that’s the hope.

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