Adam Met: AJR’S ABD Ph.D On The ABCs Of Sustainable Touring

Shervin Lainez – AJR’s Adam, Jack And Ryan Met in New York City
cover of Pollstar’s April 19, 2021 issue

Let us pray that Adam Met, bassist of the band AJR, never ever quits his day job. That is not a diss in any way on his rocking, hooky and wildly popular band, whose new album OK Orchestra, just debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative and Rock albums charts. Rather, this is said only because what Met does in his non-band time is so vital that, potentially, he could help save our planet.

“I’m two months away from submitting my Ph.d dissertation on the relationship between human rights and sustainable development,” Met says over the phone in mid-April from him home in New York City. “I’m getting it from the the University of Birmingham in the UK for a couple of reasons: First, the U.S. doesn’t offer research degrees in law. You can only get a JD in law or a more advanced degree and I wanted to get something that’s focused more specifically and wanted to do research because my goal is to help affect policy change. I also wanted an outside the U.S. perspective and this school allowed me to continue to tour and to work on music.”

Sustainability, for Met, is not some dalliance or “just bring your reusable bags to the store, man” type of environmentalism. It is central to his being. It includes his non-profit Sustainable Partners, Inc., borne from a partnership with the United Nations; the Planet Reimagined podcast; a “Time For Change” ad platform that raises funds for greening actions; and a fellowship program. The 30-year-old dates his activism to a high school field trip he took while attending New York City’s Lab School. 

“We went on a trip to hear somebody speak and the person who spoke was Mary Robinson,” Met says. of the former President of Ireland, who at the time was a the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights. “When I heard her speak on this class trip, that was the thing that convinced me that I need to be studying human rights, especially as it relates to environmentalism and climate. And funny enough, for the first time since high school, I spoke to her last week. She was going to be an upcoming guest on my podcast and I was able to tell her the story of how she inspired me to start studying in this field.”

Met’s podcast, “Planet Reimagined,” spotlights a variety of guests doing, “incredible, sustainable things to protect people and the planet,” he says. His most recent guests includes Leroy Mwasaru from Kenya who invented a toilet that helps power kitchens; and former Presidential candidate and current NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, with whom he discussed political will and sustainability. 

The podcast is available on both Apple and Spotify, the latter of which AJR has racked up some 11,196,446 million monthly listeners while their song “Weak,” received nearly half a billion – some 531.6 million – streams. On the road, too, AJR’s star is ascending. In 2019 the band grossed an average of $162,038 and sold an average of 3,974 tickets, according to Pollstar Boxoffice. Some of their bigger hauls include $290,000 gross headlining NYC’s Radio City Music Hall in October 2019 and a $237,850 gross at Boston’s Agganis Arena in November of that year.

“They are 100% behind it,” Met says of his bandmates and siblings Jack and Ryan who fill out the AJR acronym and are similarly committed to sustainability. “I’m the person who drives it but if I come to them and say, ‘This is an important thing,; they will say, ‘Absolutely.’ And they believe in the environmental issues as well. Ryan took out the trip to Brazil last year and he spent a couple of days literally just planting trees with his hands in the dirt. A few years ago he did a campaign with our fans. Over his birthday, he did an online fundraiser. I think he planted something like 10,000 trees through fan donations. Ryan and Jack are definitely committed but it’s me putting together and developing strategies.”

As the Mets are well aware, the issue of touring sustainably, over the last few years, has moved to the center of our industry as promoters, managers, agents, artists, venues, festivals and fans increasingly recognize the need for more environmentally sound practices, but the devil is still in the details – and the financials (see Met’s guest post here).  Just before the pandemic, larger touring acts like Billie Eilish and Coldplay set ambitious goals to reduce their tours’ carbon emissions, with the latter saying they wouldn’t tour until they “work out how our tour can not only be sustainable [but] how can it be actively beneficial.” Which so far has yet to materialize into a Coldplay tour.

“I look at it differently from the Coldplay approach,” Met says. “The Coldplay approach is that ‘We’re putting so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere we’re not going to tour until we tend to be completely carbon neutral, whether that’s through offsets or otherwise.’ I take a different viewpoint. I say, ‘Yes, we are putting carbon into the atmosphere by going on tour. However, let’s do the best we can and limit the amount of carbon we’re putting into the atmosphere, but at the same time make it an educational initiative for our fans.’ Because the best thing we can do as touring musicians, and as musicians in general, is activate our fanbase and teach them something about climate change. From one tour being carbon neutral, you’re never going to make enough of a difference. The difference is going to come from every single one of those fans who comes from an arena or an amphitheater going home and making changes in their life and influencing their community with concrete, actionable items.”

Which doesn’t quite explain the Lumineers’ climate-positive “III Tour,” which the ABD (all-but-dissertation) singer breaks down. “The Lumineers did achieve that through a partnership with REVERB and a whole series of offsets,” he says. “So not only do they offset all of the carbon that’s in the atmosphere from the tour itself, but they paid to offset all of the carbon from every single fan that drove to and from the show, which is a lot,” Met says. “They’re the first ones to do this and I can’t speak to the reasons as to why they did this, but I can hypothesize that somebody like The Lumineers, who have such a large touring fan base, if they’re doing something like this, it’s worth putting in their money to set an example for other artists … even if it’s not the most financially responsible thing, if thousands of other artists are doing it, the cost of being carbon neutral is going to go down.”

Met says AJR have managed to have offsets and yet still remain solvent. “We’ve come out ahead because of a few different incentives we do. At the merch table, there are always one or two items we sell and when you purchase it, we plant a couple of trees in exchange for you purchasing that merch item. If you create that fan incentive to either plant some trees or pull plastic out of the ocean, it’s a dual benefit. You get to do those things but at the same time you get to move some of the merch items. Fans feel good about it because that small incentive is really exciting for them. They get to share on social media and to their friends, ‘Look, I got this merch item from AJR, but I also planted some trees.’”

Met also preaches his best environmental practices to his team, which includes Live Nation and WME. “We were the first artists at William Morris, our agency, to say to our agents, ‘When we do one-off shows, we need a carbon fee put into the contract.’ And they didn’t understand what that was and I needed to explain it to them. But now we’re getting our promoters to pay a carbon fee so we can offset the flights and transportation and food and all of the carbon emissions related to our one-off shows.” 

WME’s Peter Schwartz, AJR’s RA, Met says was incredibly amenable. “He was totally open to it. The hardest thing in general for agents is that education process of this becoming the new normal. It’s hard to be the first at anything and so any agent is going to be, “I don’t know if the promoters are going to go for it. That’s not how it’s done.’ But as soon as I talked him through it – these are what the numbers are, it’s not that expensive to offset our carbon for the size of the touring party we had –  he said, ‘Okay, let’s try it.’” 

Met notes that Colleges were the first venues to say yes. “I think colleges really understand what’s going on. And once colleges started to say yes, other promoters started to say yes. And then Peter ends up looking like a superstar because he was the first one to do it in the company.”

The day Met spoke to Pollstar, AJR had announced a 27-date shed tour for 2022 in support of their new album, OK Orchestra. Noticeably absent from the promoter’s release, however, was any mention of sustainability. 

“We’re working on some interesting technological innovations that have never been done before,” Met says. “No matter what, from our vendors and from our promoters and from the food partners, we’re going to be working with them to make sure it’s as low impact as possible. But there are a few technological things that I’m working on right now that I can’t really reveal too much about, but suffice to say they’re unique ways to bring renewable energy into the touring space.” 

Though he won’t yet reveal details about the technological innovation, Met references it later when comparing and contrasting his simultaneous pursuits of a Ph.d and AJR. “It’s something that’s really exciting and creative. I wouldn’t have thought of this idea had I not been a musician,” he says. “It’s directly related to the fact that fans at a show are incredibly excited and that makes me excited to do something and it’s inspired by the energy of our fans. I would say they’re more similar than they are different, although the music side doesn’t require hundreds of pages of footnotes and citations.”