71: Decarbonising the UK music industry
The UK music industry contributes billions of pounds to the economy every year, but just how carbon intensive are streaming and gigging? Becky and Matt are joined for a fascinating discussion by Lewis Jamieson from Music Declares Emergency, and Carly McLachlan and Christopher Jones from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
Episode Transcript:
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Hello and welcome to Local Zero with Matt and Becky. Sadly, we’re missing Fraser this week as he is taking a well-earned break.
Matt: He is but, of course, the show must go on and today, we are talking about the only show in town which is the UK music industry. This contributes billions of pounds to the British economy every year. Many artists and bands are prominent public figures in raising awareness about the climate crisis but just how carbon intensive is the music industry today and what can we do to reduce its footprint?
Rebecca: Helping us answer that question are Carly McLachlan and Christopher Jones from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. We also have Lewis Jamieson from Music Declares Emergency.
[Music flourish]
And as today is a music-themed episode, Matt has kindly agreed to kick it off by singing us a song.
Matt: Oh goodness! Right, well my guitar is downstairs and so thankfully, we don’t have to endure that whole process, although the kids do every bathtime. I have been looking forward to this episode for a long time and it’s a topic that I think we all have been keen to cover for quite a while and it’s something that touches everybody’s lives and something that’s very close to my heart anyway. So before we get stuck into this very musical episode, how are you, Becky?
Rebecca: Hot. It’s very warm and sticky everywhere [laughter].
Matt: We’re probably sitting here on one of the hottest days of the year so far and you’ve chosen this day, of all days, to get some double-glazing in [laughter].
Rebecca: Yeah, I absolutely have. I’m sure anyone that’s been listening to the show for a while will know that I moved home earlier this year and I have been on a big building and retrofit journey which has included getting a heat pump installed. One of the other huge components of that is obviously how well the heat stays in my home. Now I did have double-glazed windows before but they were very leaky sash windows. The double-glazing was great but the actual casing just let loads and loads of air in. If it was at all windy outside, which it often is in Cornwall by the coast, the curtain would just be billowing out. Yes, we are getting double-glazed windows.
Matt: So if we hear some ambient drilling noise, that’ll be that. Yes, it is hot. Very hot. You’re down in Cornwall and I’m up in Glasgow. We have had one hour of rain for the last four or five weeks. It’s insane. In a couple of days, I’m about to go and climb some hills in Scotland and elsewhere and there are warnings that there are no mountain streams and to pack litres and litres of water. This is how bad things have got.
Rebecca: My goodness me. It’s pretty scary from that perspective but quite exciting for all those people with solar panels on their roofs.
Matt: It is, yeah. I was digging into some numbers from the Solar Association. Many of you listening to this have installed solar or are thinking about doing it if and when the opportunity and the cost allows. Some of the current data is suggesting that just in the last few months, we’re seeing install rates about quadruple what they were after the Feed-In tariff closed, which was at one point a very lucrative subsidy to get it on your roof, but also pre-Covid and before things got very disrupted and horrible. The cost of energy is making an impact. This is good and people are shoving solar panels on their roofs. This is important, Becky, because as we speak, a couple of days before, the hottest-ever temperature was recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. It is off the chart. Literally, in the charts I’ve seen, the Y axis (the one that sticks up and not sideways) didn’t account for this. I giggle but it’s frightening.
Rebecca: It’s scary.
Matt: I guess it’s this juxtaposition. Good things are happening and people are taking action but there’s a reason to do it.
Rebecca: Absolutely. The other thing that sunshine is very good for, aside from my tomato plants and courgette plants that are growing in the garden...
Matt: Jealous.
Rebecca: ...is music festivals. As we’re recording this, Glastonbury is just around the corner and my husband, Dave, just got back from Download where actually, he was saying it’s been incredibly dusty. Usually, we hear about all of the mud that people are squelching through. Dave came back and had to soak all of his stuff for days to get all of the dust out of his kit. It was pretty savage.
Matt: Yeah, reminiscent of Mad Max with Block Rockin’ Beats and dust [laughter]. Anyway, I hope he had a good time. Obviously, Glastonbury is around the corner. Glastonbury is one of these calendar events and there will be many of you who are wanting to head along. Sadly, I’ve never been along. Have you ever managed to get along, Becky?
Rebecca: I have never been to Glastonbury, no. I’m not really a fan of camping. I mean I was in my 20s and into my 30s but now [laughter]...
Matt: A bit of a problem [laughter]. A bit of an occupational hazard with a music festival and that camping thing.
Rebecca: Definitely [laughter].
Matt: I think it’s fair to say we’re both big fans of music but climate change music or the genre of climate action is something I’m increasingly aware of but I would struggle to name...
Rebecca: I have no idea about this.
Matt: It is a thing...
Rebecca: It is a thing.
Matt: ...and, in fact, two years ago, The Guardian listed the top 10 or top 20, in fact, greatest songs about the climate change crisis. One of my favourite songs on that list from Funkadelic is Maggot Brain. You sit there and it’s very psychedelic, guitar-led music. I think it’s a really important point to make that on that list, there are many artists from the 60s and 70s who, at the height of their powers and fame, were writing about broader environmental crises that weren’t just climate-related. They knew the game was up and they knew we needed to take action. They were singing about it and making the point from the early 60s onwards and I think this climate-change genre is just another iteration of that. Anyway, I said to our producer beforehand, there was one big one missing that a lot of people do know which is Michael Jackson and the Earth Song which was a huge hit in the 90s. There are many bands taking up the mantle here. Many people will have heard of The 1975 and Patrick, our producer, was saying one of his favourites did a collaboration with Greta Thunberg. It’s about the importance of music. We’ll get on to the carbon footprint of it but why do you think or do you think music is important in raising that climate agenda?
Rebecca: I actually have to admit, I hadn’t really thought about the link between music and climate before we talked about doing an episode for the show. I don’t really know why it hadn’t come to my mind. I enjoy listening to it but I’d never really thought about all of the stuff that sits behind that, whether we’re talking about the big events and the big festivals or the wider stuff that’s happening behind the industry at all. Chatting with my husband when he came back from Download, he was talking about the sheer amount of energy resources in terms of the lighting in the stadiums and the sound machines which are presumably hooked up with these generators. I don’t know and maybe we’ll hear more later. He was talking about the huge amount of resources in terms of the shower blocks as well as what people were eating there. There are a lot of vendors there and they’re all selling meat. So I just thought it was quite interesting reflecting back on that and knowing that we were doing this episode.
Matt: Going back to Glastonbury and Worthy Farm, there’s a whole rich history there about action that they’ve taken to try and reduce the environmental footprint of this. We’ll go, in a moment, to what they’re doing today but if we look back, there’s a fascinating piece by Business Green looking at the wind turbine they’ve put up this year but the back catalogue of action that they’ve taken includes replacing chemical toilets with compost toilets, hand-separated waste streams to aid recycling and banning single-use plastic drink bottles. They make you bring a reusable bottle which is obviously a very good idea. This year, they’ve banned disposable vapes which is my biggest bugbear at present. It’s a real issue that they’re getting on top of and this year, they’ve got Octopus who have erected their wind turbine for this year.
Rebecca: Amazing.
Matt: So they are doing things. Is it enough?
Rebecca: I think maybe we’ll dig into that a little bit later today but I will say this: I think it’s very exciting looking at what they’re doing not just in terms of the direct impact that they might be having but also that broader indirect impact. If people are heading to Glastonbury and start to see and interact with some of these interventions, what could that be doing to help raise awareness even further and engage people even further? Maybe nothing, maybe something but I still think it’s quite an exciting opportunity.
Matt: Yeah, and we’re definitely going to get into that in this episode about the carbon footprint of music, particularly live music that we’ll talk about here and we’ll get into the other stuff but not just the actual event that’s happening at that moment in time but how people get there and also what they eat, Becky. There are all these considerations. I just wanted to note something that I became aware of during COP26 in Glasgow which was a neat way of turning this on its head. Can music generate energy and cut emissions? At a venue in Glasgow, SWG3, they had this amazing body heat experiment where the body heat generated by people was piped via a carrier fluid 200 metres beneath the surface in a borehole and they used it as a thermal battery. That was then able to be released to help drive heat pumps and generate power. So that’s a little bit of a play on that kinetic dancefloor that you might have seen trialled at big toy shops [laughter].
Rebecca: My kids have one downstairs [laughter] and it plays music. I love that because when I dredge my mind back to when I did actually used to go to clubs pre-children, they were always so hot. So I wonder if this could also make it just more comfortable to dance around and extract all that heat and actually make it useful. Brilliant idea.
Matt: Quite right and it’s not just on the venues and tour operators. I guess it’s a lot to do with the bands and not just what they’re writing about but also the efforts that they’re going to to support these things directly and not just indirectly. Our producer, Patrick, is a big musician himself and he pointed to Coldplay. Back in the day, I used to be a Coldplay fan before... they got less good [laughter]. I don’t want to offend anybody on the call or Chris Martin for that matter but they’ve done some amazing things.
Rebecca: Because Chris Martin listens to our podcast [laughter].
Matt: Of course. Personal friend of mine or was at least. They’ve done all sorts in terms of slashing their CO2 emissions I think by half from their previous stadium tour, cutting waste by two-thirds and planting 5 million trees. There’s a whole lot of stuff that they’ve done and we cannot forget either that they have a kinetic dancefloor too apparently but I mean I haven’t been to a Coldplay gig. So there’s a whole gamut of stakeholders out there who have been doing a lot of stuff. I just wanted to end on this question, Becky, before we bring people in. Either personally or with friends and family, do you think music could have a real impact on people’s decisions about climate action? Do you think it has that power?
Rebecca: I think music is incredibly powerful. I was reflecting on this when we were just talking about the songs that are associated with climate change and actually, I have songs that are so personal to me that have probably nothing to do with climate change but this emotion that they throw up can almost put me into despair, hope or stimulate action. I think music can be so powerful in that way but not just looking at music from a perspective of looking at what the music industry is doing or looking at particular musicians as public figures but I actually think leveraging music as an art form can be an incredible way of engaging people too.
Matt: I’d agree. Win the heart and not just the head. I think there’s a lot to be said for that. I think without further ado, let’s bring in the experts and hear what they have to say.
[Music flourish]
Carly: I’m Carly McLachlan and I’m Professor of Climate and Energy Policy. I lead Tyndall Manchester, a research group at the University of Manchester.
Chris: My name is Chris Jones. I’m the Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester.
Lewis: Hi, I’m Lewis Jamieson and I’m one of the co-founders of the UK charity Music Declares Emergency. I’ve worked in the music industry for 35 years.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Welcome everybody to this exciting episode. I’ve been wanting to do this for many months and, in fact, probably years now. One thing that I guess has been bugging me really is when I’ve got Spotify on of an evening or on the way to work is just how carbon intensive that process is. I’d not just be listening to this recorded music but also the live music associated with some of my favourite bands. Is this a guilty pleasure? I have many [laughter] but is this one of the top ones that I need to be addressing? Lewis, you’ve been in and around the music industry for many years. Is this something that each of us should be aware of? Just how carbon-intensive is the music industry today?
Lewis: Well, like anything that creates things and uses energy, it uses carbon and, yes, there is an impact, absolutely. I think then it becomes a moral judgement as to what you think is a reasonable amount of carbon, if we’re talking strictly in carbon terms, for an industry to use to create the artefacts and to create the experiences that it does. Certainly, in the global mix of what we solve first to solve the climate crisis, the music industry and even the global music industry would come a hell of a long way down the list. Your big friends like energy production, energy consumption, agriculture, fashion and travel are all way beyond it. The other problem with the music industry is what do you define as the music industry? Music’s tentacles spread everywhere. Is the Ramones’ t-shirt in Primark a music industry product or is it a fashion product? Is the music on a film a film product or a music product and so on and so forth? In terms of you listening to your streaming service of choice, without wishing to highlight one over the other, there is, to my knowledge, no comprehensive data there and there is a huge debate going on as to who owns what emissions there. It’s a really tangled web but what you can say is that certainly, in Europe, the UK and, to a degree, the United States of America, the major music markets and the music industry have started to grasp the nettle a little bit and get a lot better with a lot of the overproduction, overuse and, shall we say, somewhat cavalier attitudes towards things that it had up until the middle of the last decade I would say.
Matt: Yeah, and I think that’s a really important framing again, Lewis. Often, when we’re dealing with carbon emissions, we’re looking at these bins of emissions like buildings, transport and food and, as you say, music covers a lot of these. Carly and Chris, as scientists at the Tyndall Centre in Manchester, your bag or at least part of it is trying to put some numbers to this. Do you agree with Lewis’ point? Can we easily quantify or disaggregate the emissions associated with the music industry and if so, what are the biggest drivers associated with it?
Chris: The short answer, as Lewis pointed out, is that there isn’t good data really holistically about the music industry. It’s a bit of a different beast from steel products which are measured in and out of countries. We can work that out quite nicely. Music is lots of different things and has been pointed out there. Whereas we can point to a reduction in CD sales and the life cycle of emissions associated with that as a tick, streaming, of course, has stepped into that gap and is consumed in a different way again to CDs and all those physical items and so the nature of the footprint has changed. The measuring of what’s being used by who is even less clear than it was then. Even with streaming, for example, you can ask five different researchers, ‘What is the carbon intensity of a bit of data?’ and you might get different answers because it’s something that’s changing so rapidly with the technology involved that sits behind it in datacentres, etcetera, but also the supply of energy to those datacentres. It’s rapidly evolving. Are people streaming more frequently? The consumption side and the supply side are a bit unclear at the moment with music. What we tend to focus on is live music where, in some ways, it’s been more packaged up with the boundary being a bit clearer but even there, where are people travelling from to go to shows? How are they travelling? That’s not information that is available and so you can’t put a really solid number on that as you can for a tonne of steel.
Rebecca: It’s such an interesting point and I was reflecting to Matt earlier that my husband has just come back from being at the Download Festival. Does that make me sound really old that I just called it The Download Festival? [Laughter] He’s just come back from Download.
Matt: The Download, yeah, yeah. The Glastonbury, yeah.
Rebecca: [Laughter] Moving swiftly on. He was reflecting to me that it took some of his friends 14 hours to get there with just the sheer amount of traffic going on around people trying to get in once they got close. Not just that but then when they were there, all that they could find to eat that was being sold were burgers and meat-intensive food. So I think it raises a really interesting point around these boundaries but if we can just start to break that down a little bit because I don’t have it very clear in my head and I think we’ve alluded to a couple of things. What really are some of those big contributors to emissions? Where are our big buckets of things that we can think about and that we can look at?
Chris: Just focusing on the live music for a moment which is where we’ve done the most work, in some ways, even that question about where most of the emissions coming from is a difficult question because we can point to audience travel as the biggest share of emissions potentially because there are more people. It stands to reason that that’s where most of the carbon is but people are travelling and they’re going to travel somewhere to some extent and they’re going to that festival, so that festival can do something about those emissions. If we look at it purely in proportion, we might think that the festival itself isn’t a big source of emissions but actually, it’s the source of emissions that the industry should probably be the most concerned about in the immediacy because it’s what it has the most direct control over. So it may not necessarily be just about proportion but also what’s there in front of us to start taking ownership of and action on most rapidly. Energy at festivals, band travel, equipment usage and these things around the industry and how it functions itself are the things that we can get into first as well as looking at the wider chain of emissions that are potentially bigger in scale.
Matt: We’ve got this amorphous beast which is music and we can say similar things around these kinds of recreational activities that we engage in like sport and the enjoyment of that might be another. I’m just trying to boil this down to something that an audience can listen to this and say, ‘If there are two or three things we should be pushing at, what should they be?’ Carly, through Tyndall, you’ve been working with Massive Attack I think on this which is another amazing band. Did you get a sense from them about the things that they were most concerned about and they said, ‘Look, if you’re going to tackle two or three things, this ought to be it’?
Carly: I think the point that Chris makes is right. It’s about the areas that you have control over and for me, it links to having authentic leadership in a space. You have to get the stuff that you’ve got direct control over sorted out before you can effectively unleash the power of music to bring people on the journey you want to take them on around climate action or even to start getting involved in what you think they should be doing about how they’re travelling to your show. So if I’ve got 70 trucks and I’m knocking about all over the place back and forth with no efficient routing in a private jet but you need to get a bus to my gig, I think that’s a problematic thing to communicate with audiences. Whereas, I think it feels much more consistent if, right from the beginning of your tour, you’ve thought about how you’re designing your set so that you’re reducing the number of trucks that you’re taking on the road and you’re thinking about reusing things. Some of the staging providers, for example, will give you a catalogue of what they already have and so if you need something that’s like, don’t make it half a metre wider because we’ve already got one that you can reuse. You can be thinking about it right from that early stage and get the number of truck movements down. You can be thinking about going on the train instead of flying. You can certainly be thinking about flying commercially rather than in a private jet. The great thing about working with Massive Attack for us was they’d already done loads of this. They’re such an informed and engaged partner to work with. We might, as academics, say, ‘It would be really great if bands thought about not flying between gigs,’ and people can kind of roll their eyes and think, ‘Well, what would these academics know? They’re not in the industry.’ But Massive Attack was already doing that and it’s so powerful. If you can say, ‘Look, these guys do it.’ They haven’t just done it right now and we’re out talking about this research. They did it in their last show or in their last couple of shows.
Matt: So what kinds of things have they been doing, Carly? In the kickaround, before you guys came in, we were talking about Coldplay and some of the things that they’ve been talking about. Is there anything that Massive Attack came out and said, ‘Look, these are the things we can control and these are the things that we’re doing’?
Carly: I think for them it’s about thinking about the routing, organising your timing so that you can travel by train as much as possible between your shows and thinking about making it a brilliant, beautiful, engaging show but that travels in fewer trucks. That really requires thinking about it at the beginning rather than the end. I think the other thing that is really exciting about them is that they do a lot of stuff working with partners and so they’re thinking about the venues that they’re going to or thinking about the local transport partnerships around the show to say, ‘Actually, how can we try and get tickets lined up with a rail ticket?’ How can you think about selling a show so that you have a round of sales that is for people that could walk to the show first and you sell as many tickets in that geography as possible and you take it out and out? You don’t do anything that’s about trying to promote international travel packages for shows, so you’re not driving that demand by creating easy pathways to fly around the world to go to shows.
Matt: It’s worth noting from your report... Chris, I think something that you’ve maybe taken the lead on there is that urban festivals can have a lower footprint because that’s where the people are and not necessarily Worthy Farm in Glastonbury. I’m doing it down. People want to get away for the weekend and I completely understand that but that kind of logic, Carly, is what you’re pointing at.
Chris: Yeah, we mention in the report a little bit that festivals, in particular, have a struggle because they are like a pop-up city without the infrastructure to support that. We struggle to decarbonise cities like Manchester anyway and doing that for somewhere that only exists for two weeks is a huge challenge in itself. There are places that are already set up with transport links and electricity-grid connections and those kinds of festivals will have a head start on being lower carbon just because they’re aligned with infrastructure. You do need a different type of infrastructure to be low carbon than you do to do it in a carbon-intensive way.
Lewis: That said, we have a very strange festival calendar here in the UK because of the way it’s grown up and so we don’t really have dedicated festival sites. As Chris points out or was it you, Matt? Glastonbury is probably the worst place in the world to try and get mains power to. Why would you do it? It’s used for five days a year. Nonetheless, there’s Glasgow Green and there’s Hyde Park. There are sites around the country that would be prime candidates to be put onto the grid and to be able to use clean, renewable power. We did some investigative work with Festival Republic, the big festival promoter over here, which they’re continuing to pursue. The amount of bureaucracy you have to get through is mind-boggling. So without wishing to sound too much like a housebuilding MP, we could do with slashing some of the planning around this stuff if we’re serious about it. The way I always explain it is Reading Festival is next to a high-speed railway line. There clearly is a massive power source somewhere close by because there are trains whizzing past. That site has been used every year and clearly, it would be a prime candidate. Hyde Park is slap bang in the middle of London and is about to host at least six weekends of live entertainment that I’m aware of this summer. I take Carly’s point but I’d like to just do a little bit of justification of my world. Not many artists use private jets. It is a very, very small amount of artists that use private jets. They are fascinatingly expensive and incredibly impractical unless you are literally headlining across the world. Most artists do travel by sleeper coach, even headliners at big festivals. But I do agree with virtually everything that’s been said there and routing is the big one. In terms of what the artist can do on their own, routing is the big one. Routing has been recognised finally as something that has to be better. Again, I think it’s important to point out that it’s not the artists necessarily making these decisions. It’s their booking agents and their management because the artist always ends up being the one the finger is pointed at and oftentimes, it’s not the artists that make the decision. It used to be the artists or the artists’ representatives would chase the money. There is increasingly an understanding that a combination of, obviously, being mindful of the money but also being mindful of the impacts coming into play. The final thing I’d mention is the idea of exclusions which are a big thing here in live festival events. If you’re not aware of what they are, if you’re booked for a big end slot at a festival, in your contract it will say you cannot play within 100, 150, 200 miles of that site within one, two, three, four or six months sometimes. So if you start to look at that in terms of international shows, I have had artists that have flown to Coachella to play a show and flown back because I couldn’t get them any shows anywhere on the West Coast because of the exclusion. It was more cost-effective to fly them in and out than it was to try and fly them to the other side of America to then play shows. That’s another change that, thankfully, is coming.
Rebecca: Wow! The more we dig into it, the more complex and interesting this is getting. Lewis, I’m particularly interested in what Music Declares Emergency is doing in this broader focus because you’re bringing together not just artists but other people in the industry behind the scenes. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about what the broader focus of change is. What do we need to see happening? You mentioned about timing and locations of gigs. Do people that are buying tickets, who are ultimately driving the desire for those events, have a role to play in addressing any of this?
Lewis: Let’s start with Music Declares Emergency’s position on a lot of this stuff. We’re very much in the same position as Carly and her position of you solve the things you can solve first before you start telling anybody else what to do. From our perspective, it was very important when we started, and remains important, that the industry keeps trying to get better across the board. One of the things we’re looking to do is use the artist’s unique position that they have with their fan bases. To break open the conversation, our starting position was that the conversation around the climate emergency was arguably a little bit exclusive and actually, the research has just backed us up. It wasn’t reaching enough people. A lot of people felt that it was a conversation they weren’t invited to and so it was a conversation, with no disrespect intended, for academics, scientists and people who lived in urban centres, etcetera; a certain type of person, shall we say, without wishing to get too stereotypical. We believe that music could be a way of encouraging people to come out of that thinking and start to actually see the relevance of the conversation to their day-to-day lives through their favourite artists finding ways to make the conversation more amenable. I think, to a degree, what we’ve done over the last four or so years has proved that’s the case. It’s not just us but lots of other people as well. It’s been happening in film, TV and all across culture. That’s one of the founding principles of it. The problem is that you start to hit value judgements. For instance, if a music fan says to you, ‘I’m going to go to Benicàssim,’ which is the big summer festival, ‘because all my favourite bands are playing,’ given how we’re talking, we’d say, ‘That’s bad behaviour because you should go to a music festival in the UK.’ The question back is then if they say, ‘But it’s my summer holiday,’ do we then make a value judgement that that’s okay or is that not okay? So it gets very complex around making value judgements about people’s behaviour. We tend to feel that it’s more powerful to use music to bring people together to discuss and feel engaged with the conversation to then use that sense of collective power to push for the big changes we need in terms of the delivery systems; for instance, transport networks. You can just about tour Europe by train but it’s eye-wateringly expensive to take your crew and the band on a train. Actually, the cheapest way to do it is in a sleeper coach but, again, a great example of this is when electric options of sleeper coaches start to come through... I was talking to somebody who hires them and they were saying that, as yet, there is no government tax incentive on them. So what’s going to happen is when they have these new vehicles that are either hybrid or electric and you say, ‘I want to hire a sleeper coach,’ they’ll say, ‘You can have the old, nasty diesel one and it costs this much or you can have the brand, spanking new low emissions one but it’s going to cost you five times as much.’ Is it Norway where they adjusted the market and created electric car usage? We have nothing like that in this country. There are questions there about how you incentivise behaviours as well and that’s something that Music Declares Emergency is always talking to the industry about.
Matt: I think it’s an important point to raise there about the costs and implications. So if you take your hypothetical example of a UK band touring Europe and they’re making the point that they’re going to go by train. It’s going to be super low carbon and they’re going to go by electric trains all the way but it’s going to take them longer and cost more. That cost has then got to follow through somewhere. Going back to Becky’s point, it’s the consumer that picks up the tab. I want to come back to this consumer point, and I’m maybe going to defer to Carly and Chris here, and many people will be listening to this on Apple, Spotify or whatever platform they’re on and thinking, ‘What can I do?’ Because many of the points that you all raise are obviously completely sensible but it feels like it’s a bit outwith the control, which we keep coming back to, of the consumer or is it? Carly and Chris, have you maybe got a different view here or a similar view about what we, as individual consumers, can do?
Carly: I think there’s something in celebrating the artists that you love doing things that you think are great; that the way that you interact with those artists, whoever that is, probably through social media, is that you celebrate the stuff that they’re doing that you think is great. I think also it’s reasonable. If you’re an active consumer that would ask questions about the places where you buy things from that you would be asking venues, artists or festivals what they’re doing about stuff and what you’d like to see them doing. I think there is a role for consumers for sure but I actually think that there’s a lot of activity within the industry trying to make this stuff happen at the moment. I don’t know if the tide has completely turned to mean that it’s all in hand but there are an awful lot of pockets of people trying to positively disrupt traditional practice. So I don’t think we should put it all on consumers. The other thing I would say about cost is we have to remember that the system we’re in at the moment has all kinds of costs that fall on people down the line. I think to present it just as your ticket price might go up a bit but what are the implications of all these emissions for particularly the most vulnerable people in society? It’s not about saying this one costs more and that one costs less. They cost differently. If you look at the cost of some big concert tickets, I’m not sure that the additional cost of some of these green measures, some of which are doing less and costs less... let’s not present it all as costing more because some of this stuff actually will save money in the tour. I’m not sure that that is the straw that would break the camel’s back if you look particularly at the big venue ticket prices now. Lewis might tell me that’s wrong and that’s fine if he disagrees [laughter].
Lewis: No, I don’t disagree with anything you’ve just said there. The greatest example is putting grid power into festivals. Festivals spend large amounts of money on diesel because you need two generators as well. You don’t need one generator per station, you need two because if one breaks, you need a backup. So you’ve got this generator running at a low level but nonetheless running all day just in case and so you’ve got wastage. I totally agree with you. One of the things we got very excited about and the idea of bringing grid power to any site was not just that it would reduce the energy cost and obviously reduce the emissions but also it would mean that that site might be accessible to groups that couldn’t access it otherwise not just because of the cost bringing in power generation and everything around it but also the insurance costs would go down. You increase access and so there are all kinds of benefits. I totally agree with you. My issue about rail travel is more focused on the UK than it is in Europe [laughter]. It’s quite doable in Europe. Once you get to Gare du Nord in Paris, you’re okay and your numbers start to work. It’s just getting there that’s the problem. Again, the music industry is very bad at advocating for changes in terms of the legal frameworks that exist or the tax frameworks that exist and I think it needs to find its voice around this stuff. That’s my honest, general, personal opinion. It’s got this huge amount of financial and advocacy power. There are things like night-time economy public transport services, train travel, tax breaks for sustainability initiatives and there’s the thread of community that the entire venue landscape of Great Britain creates. It’s this community of people with shared views. One of the things with Music Declares Emergency that’s very interesting is how we can start to use that to better the places that music exists in.
Matt: I also just wanted to ask a question. It’s something Chris said earlier on about this shift from CDs to streaming and this notion that it’s going to have a lower environment, shall we say, footprint associated with that. There are a couple of the big shifts that we’ve seen in the industry and streaming is one. The second was obviously punctuated massively by Covid but my impression of this, and please sense check this, is that there’s been a much bigger emphasis on generating income through live music because streaming just doesn’t generate the same income for bands that it might have done with a traditional record label deal. Are we in a situation now where the music industry is actually beholden to more live music and by extension, is it under greater pressure to put on this festival of music 360 days a year? Does that make this an even bigger problem in terms of the environmental and carbon footprint?
Lewis: The economics of it are certainly skewed towards live, absolutely. Live is now the major profit centre. It’s literally changed over in the last 30 years which is why, at some of the shows at the big venues, your ticket can cost you upwards of £200 as I discovered to my cost when my 14-year-old daughter said, ‘I want to go to X,’ a couple of weeks ago. There is an argument that says that’s unsustainable. There are voices within the music industry that wonder just how long and what capacity this market has given the prevailing economic winds. What the solution to that is I’m not sure. Certainly, in terms of venue life, you can see how venues could be zero carbon. There are electricity supplies fixed. You just have to fix the rest of it. In terms of your Scope 1 and 2, you’re zero carbon and then your problem is your audience travel if you’re going to start including that. With everything else, you could be as near to zero carbon as you can get. Certainly, the O2, Hydro and various other venues are well on the way on that journey, so it’s not all doom. There’s a lot of great work going on.
Carly: If you think about artists maybe wanting to publish the footprint of their tour or having a target for tour-on-tour reductions, then I think it’s totally possible that you start to see bands and their associated management saying that they want to go to this particular chain of venues because they all have a zero-carbon electricity contract in place. If they don’t do that, they will have an increase on the year before. One of the things we often get is, ‘Massive Attack is a big name and they’ve had a lot of years of enjoying this world and now they’re talking about all these things that have implications for more upcoming artists.’ I think it’s actually completely the other way around in that they are taking the opportunity and the platform that they have to try and create change in the industry that helps everybody coming through. If you create a legacy by convincing a particular venue to go on to a zero-carbon tariff, then everyone else doesn’t have to do that work anymore because they’re just on it. A particular example of that is Billy Eilish at the O2 insisted that the whole venue was vegan for the time that she was there and the legacy that remains after that is that they don’t sell beefburgers anymore. They had a relationship with a plant-based company and they brought some products back but they didn’t bring beefburgers back. I suppose it’s not a transformation of the whole system but that’s one thing that she leaves for everybody that comes through that afterwards.
Lewis: We were at the Billy shows and they were fascinating to be part of because it was the most joined-up expression I’ve seen and for me, it was exactly how you do it. The venue, the promoter, the manager, the artist and the audience, because of the way that they promoted it, were all aware of what was going on. So from the moment you got off the tube at North Greenwich, all the way through into the show and out of the show, you knew what was going on and it created these kinds of possibilities of how things could be going forward which is a really powerful thing. That’s 120,000 people over six nights who were exposed to these ideas and not in a preachy, sanctimonious, finger-waggy way but in a ‘Wow! Look at this. This is amazing!’ Backstage was the same. The crew and the production managers were on board. It was brilliant. It should be the template that everybody follows. It also introduced new ideas, and economies of scale being what they are, that will filter down to those smaller bands just like Coldplay and Massive Attack. New innovations that they’ve taken their money out of their pockets to create will filter down and become affordable at lower levels and, therefore, drive change. So they should be applauded every time they do something like that.
Rebecca: Yeah, I love that. You kind of took the question right out of my mouth because I was going to ask you how powerful you thought the music industry and the role of music more broadly could be in tackling change, really addressing the climate crisis and creating that bigger legacy. I’m wondering if you’ve seen any other areas where that’s happening as well.
Lewis: I don’t want to sound glib but we see it all the time with what we do around No Music On A Dead Planet which is our central campaign. Billy, again, wore that slogan on a specially-created outfit to the American Music Awards. It just kickstarted this kind of youth engagement with the phrase and now you see that phrase all over social media all the time. It’s become like this little badge of saying, ‘I like music and I’m concerned about the climate.’ You think, on one level, ‘So what?’ But on another level, that’s really powerful because it allows people to identify each other. One of the biggest problems with young people in terms of the climate emergency is a feeling of desperation and isolation. That’s not helped, by the way, by mainstream media demonising their spokespeople as ‘doom goblins’ and going on and on saying, ‘Why don’t they just cheer up?’ as though there’s something wrong with them being anxious about their planet being on fire. That support not just from Billy but from Foals, Radiohead, Bring Me the Horizon and millions of others has brought all these different disparate people together not just in the UK but across the world. People can see each other now. One of the things that particularly interests us is this idea of the global power of music to allow people to recognise other people – unlike them but like them is the phrase I mean. You get kids who are into K-pop talking across time zones and seeing each other’s realities and that’s far more powerful than a documentary about why climate justice is important because this is happening on the other side of the planet. If you’re actually actively speaking with somebody on the other side of the planet and they can tell you in their own words how this is affecting them, that’s far more powerful. There’s also that kind of shift of the media agenda, what they call the Overton window shift, which is very important. In the UK, I would suggest we’re in a quite benign situation in terms of acceptance of the problem. We deal with other countries like Brazil and America where that’s clearly not the case. We need to keep shifting that Overton window because we need to get to a point where everybody accepts that this is a global problem and, therefore, we can start to look at global solutions. Music, again, is a great carrier of messages across borders and across cultures, particularly and weirdly, because of streaming which seems to have finally broken down the UK/US hegemony over popular music as you’ll see if you’ve got kids who will be listening to a K-pop track one minute, then something from Brazil the next minute and then a death metal band from China. You’ll be saying, ‘Where did you hear all this?’ They’ll say, ‘TikTok.’ There’s this really beautiful power that music has to energise the conversation at a level that avoids all the pitfalls of the conversation up until a few years ago.
Matt: What feels mightily important, Lewis, is this diversity of perspectives because climate change and the climate breakdown is something that we all share. Whatever postcode you are on planet Earth, it’s something that we do share but it’s impacting us in different ways and people are doing different things to tackle it. This pod is something where we’re talking predominantly about what’s happening in the UK but really, music in those communities of interest around a particular band or a genre of music opens up a platform for wider debate. I take your point and it’s a really important one that it’s not just about what the song is telling you but the band and that platform for dialogue and the exchange of ideas is arguably the most important part of it.
Lewis: It’s really important that the music industry gets its house in order because, as I say, that allows artists to speak out. When we launched and Foals was one of our early supporters, the Daily Mail turned around an article within 24 hours and they carbon-audited Foals' forthcoming world tour so that they could call them out for being climate hypocrites. There are all kinds of reasons why that just doesn’t fly anyway, no pun intended. It shows you what you’re dealing with. There are plenty of organisations and players on the other side of this argument that will tell you one thing and do another or will find a space to deny the necessary action. Without wishing to be so colloquial about it, music can cut through a lot of that bullshit and get to the human element of this crisis and get to a resonant emotional response which is kind of what’s missing a lot of the time from the very necessary IPCC/COP process which can be a little bit abstract. People want to feel how it affects their locality, their experience and their day-to-day and music culture has always been good about taking complex ideas and making them simple. This is just the latest example of it really.
Carly: I was just going to say that I think the idea as well of building up the number of artists, Lewis, is really important. It needs the artist that is really in the firing line for these things to come forward and say that they’re trying to cut their emissions and that they think these things are important. I think the more you build that up, the more you’ve got that kind of confidence in the numbers to say that it’s utterly ridiculous to say you’re a climate hypocrite when you’re genuinely trying to cut the emissions of your tour. We all live in a world where you can’t spend a pound without emitting carbon because it’s so pervasive in our society but actually, the more you have people that can share that attention... like you say with Foals getting so much grief about it, it’s a really brave thing to do. Hopefully, as more artists and more of the industry comes forward and do it, there’s just more of a strength in that. Of course, we’re emitting carbon and everybody is in the way that we’re doing things but what we’re trying to do is emit much less. I suppose that leads me to say that I think there is this kind of solidarity that’s needed in celebrating and learning from each other and also being able to provide critical-friend feedback to each other as well without it becoming an all-in, green-on-green argument where all these outside forces are just delighted that we’re all arguing with each other. That is challenging because there will be stuff that some bands will do something that another band thinks isn’t a great idea. It’s about trying to keep the tenor of that so that you can say, ‘Loved all of that stuff. Can you tell me a bit more about that because I’m not so sure that feels like a great idea?’ Without it being as if these are the two polar opposites and somebody doing a set of actions, ABC, and somebody doing a set of actions, XYZ. Actually, that’s all quite close to each other and there are a lot of people that are happy to see none of it being done. This applies right across every sector and not just music and environmentalists, in my personal view, are often quite keen to argue amongst themselves whilst forgetting that there are an awful lot of people outside that are just rubbing their hands with glee that it’s more of the same and more of the incumbent interests getting to sweat their assets.
Rebecca: I realise we’re running to the end of our slot but with that focus on action, which I think is such an important thing to end on, I’d like to ask each of you what you think we should be prioritising. What action do we need to drive forward? Maybe in 30 seconds or less, where do we need to really be pushing our attention now if we want to make a big difference?
Carly: Set it as your objective at the outset and get everybody on your team targeting that as one of the things they have to deliver on just like all the other constraints you have on a tour. You just feed it in as one of those and brilliant creative people can make these things happen I believe.
Rebecca: Chris?
Chris: I’ll go with audience transport and find out what the groups are doing to work with the cities and local transport providers to make sure you can leave a gig at 11.30 at night and get to where you’re going to for more people. I think we need to see more of that and that will make a big difference.
Rebecca: Lewis, close us out. What should we all be doing?
Lewis: I think the industry should be working collaboratively, which is not necessarily something it’s used to doing, to support the artists to drive the changes because ultimately, the changes are great but if the artists aren’t part of the make-up, the audience won’t understand the changes. The changes on their own aren’t significant enough in the global scheme of things to make a difference but the changes, as understood as examples of a new reality translated through the artists to the fans, are an extremely powerful thing. It’s a double win. You get the change, lose the carbon and you get the buy-in from the audience and the sense of purpose.
Matt: Fantastic. Thank you all. So much to think about. Listen, we’ve got to close out. You’ve all been listening to Local Zero. Please take a minute if you can to subscribe to the pod. Hit the follow or subscribe button wherever you listen to us and if you know anybody who might enjoy it, and word of mouth is a powerful tool too, why don’t you suggest our podcast to them?
Rebecca: If you haven’t already, please do take a minute to find and follow us on Twitter. We are @LocalZeroPod and get involved with the discussions there. Email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts but for now, thank you again to our wonderful guests for a fabulous discussion. Thanks to everyone for listening and goodbye.
Matt: Thanks and goodbye.
[Music flourish]
Transcribed by
PODTRANSCRIBE