ADVERTISEMENT

Bands Try to Cut Back on Touring’s Massive Carbon Footprint

Bands Try to Cut Back on Touring’s Massive Carbon Footprint

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Chris Martin scored his first big hit in 2000 with a song called Yellow, but these days, he’s more interested in green. Coldplay, the band Martin fronts, announced in November that it wouldn’t go on tour to promote its latest album, Everyday Life, until it could find a way to make concerts more sustainable and beneficial to the environment. The Dave Matthews Band said in January it would offset carbon emissions created by its 2020 summer tour by planting a million trees. And electronic dance pioneer Massive Attack is planning to tour Europe by train, considered a more eco-friendly mode of transport, and work with a climate research center to track its carbon footprint.

The moves reflect a new level of concern in the industry about the environmental impact of live music, which generated more than $10 billion in revenue in 2018. Issues such as global warming and sustainability have become passionate concerns for many of the concert industry’s fans—and increasingly for the musicians that cater to them.

“Stepping out for the environment isn’t for hippies anymore but it’s something everybody is concerned about,” says Fine Stammnitz, a Berlin-based manager at Green Touring Network. “Many artists are realizing this, that they have the potential to influence in a positive way.” The organization has published a guide on how to make tours greener.

Bands Try to Cut Back on Touring’s Massive Carbon Footprint

It’s not always easy to walk the talk. A growing number of artists, including Fatboy Slim and Peggy Gou, have environmental demands built into their contracts when they tour, such as bans on plastic cutlery in backstage catering. But there’s almost no way of avoiding carbon emissions produced by a tour, which involves moving hundreds of people and tons of equipment across large distances. And since it’s also the single biggest source of income for most acts, hitting the road is inevitable for bands of all sizes.

Lisa Pomerantz, who books travel for acts including Jack Johnson and Childish Gambino, says that real change will require action by venue owners, concert promoters, and the fans. Having an artist, say, ban water bottles or plastic straws from their dressing room goes only so far. “Right now,” she says, “it’s like putting lipstick on a pig.” Pomerantz says she’s investigated ways to make tours more environmentally friendly, but some things won’t change unless everyone in the concert ecosystem starts demanding them. At a conference for the music production industry, she asked the head of a major bus company about the possibility of equipping a vehicle with a five-gallon water receptacle to minimize the use of plastic bottles on board. He said nobody had requested something like that yet, but if Beyoncé did, he’d build it.

After piracy decimated sales of recorded music in the early 2000s, many acts invested heavily to maximize the spectacle of their live performances and charge higher ticket prices. Today’s fans are willing to shell out more than $100 to see Beyoncé, Pink, or Taylor Swift, because they employ a cast and crew similar to Cirque du Soleil or a Broadway show. Yet such major tours can require substantial resources. The set and production equipment for Beyoncé’s Formation world tour filled seven Boeing 747s and more than 70 trucks, according to the BBC. More than 2 million people saw the show, which stopped in cities across North America and Europe.

Bands Try to Cut Back on Touring’s Massive Carbon Footprint

Major acts like Coldplay can afford to halt touring while figuring out how to lessen their environmental impact. The band grossed $731.8 million touring in the last decade, according to industry trade publication Pollstar. But lesser-known artists can’t stay off the road, since streaming revenues haven’t been able to compensate for the collapse in CD and downloaded music sales. “Taking the decision to stop touring is quite a radical one,” says Chiara Badiali, researcher at Julie’s Bicycle, a London-based organization that offers tools to track and lower the carbon footprint in creative industries. “It’s not necessarily a short-term option for many artists who depend on touring for a living.”

Although planes are known to be massive emissions producers, tours that exclude air travel still leave a carbon footprint. A project led by Popakademie, a German university dedicated to popular music and its business, tracked the emissions from a 2014 tour by indie band We Invented Paris. The group hit European cities including Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich, with the musicians and their equipment transported by van. The analysis showed that roughly a third of the tour’s carbon footprint came from audience travel, and another third from a venue’s power consumption.

Bands Try to Cut Back on Touring’s Massive Carbon Footprint

Even when concerts are aggressive about being more sustainable—Britain’s Glastonbury Festival, which has a capacity of 210,000, has been boosting its use of clean energy—the impact of audience travel can easily swamp their efforts. For bigger acts, this can represent as much as 80% of the carbon footprint, according to a 2015 study assessing the environmental impact of U.K. festivals by Powerful Thinking, an events industry nonprofit.

“We have no leverage” on audience travel, says Delphine de Labarriere, who oversees sustainability at Stade de France, an 80,000-capacity soccer stadium near Paris that’s also the biggest music venue in the country.

Part of the solution is making sure the venue is easily accessible by public transportation. About 65% of Stade de France’s audience comes this way, including VIPs, de Labarriere says. The arena also is implementing operational changes, such as banning single-use plastics for VIP receptions. Transitioning to water fountains instead of selling plastic water bottles will be its next goal, she says. The venue has even started working with a local provider for its flower adornment in VIP lounges after noticing that 90% of all of the cut flowers were imported.

Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, has a similar approach. It has removed 6 million plastic straws from its owned and operated venues and eliminated the use of 175,000 single-use bottles by installing water refill stations. Lucy August-Perna, head of sustainability for the venues it owns, says the company is investigating ways to reduce its energy use. “That’s what we can control and where we can make an impact,” she says. Yet most of the more than 30,000 shows Live Nation promoted in 2019 were at venues owned by other companies, which may not have the same resources to overhaul their approach, she says.

The Dave Matthews Band, which was designated a Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations Environment program, will use nontoxic cleaning products and a reusable water bottle service on its upcoming tour, in addition to planting the 1 million trees to offset carbon emissions from fan transportation, as well as its own flights.

Still, even the most green-conscious bands must balance their desire to be more sustainable against the financial necessity of touring. “The reason we are musicians is because we want to share it with others,” says Flavian Graber, lead singer of We Invented Paris. “I absolutely think you can go on tour and have a concern about the environment. It’s a matter of just keeping our footprint as low as possible.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Ellis at jellis27@bloomberg.net, Benedikt KammelJennifer Ryan

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.