REVERB Unveils Music Climate Revolution Campaign

– Music Climate Revolution

Artists including Billie Eilish, Shawn Mendes, Brittany Howard, Dave Matthews Band, Dead & Company, Jack Johnson, The Lumineers, Maroon 5 and many more have partnered with REVERB for the Music Climate Revolution, a campaign whose goal is to move the entire music industry toward being “climate positive.”

The campaign, which launched today, has three major areas of action: the reduction of tours’ carbon footprint through various operational efficiencies and changes; the support of carbon-fighting projects through fundraising; and education of artists, audiences and the industry to take further individual and collective action.

“This is a rallying cry from our industry and nonprofit partners to all of music, all music makers and music lovers, it is the entire community that we want to be involved in this,” REVERB co-founder Adam Gardner, also of the band Guster, told Pollstar. “We understand not everyone is in the same place on the path to sustainability in our climate actions. Everyone is committed to moving down that path and moving down that path, towards more action.”

Today, artist partners posted on social media about their participation in the campaign and invited fans from around the world to learn more about how they can participate in a movement towards a more sustainable world at MusicClimateRevolution.org. Some of the ways people are encouraged to take action are by analyzing their own carbon footprint, committing to reduce their consumption of meat, registering to vote, and learning about different practice they can adopt and avoid in their own day-to-day life.

Some of the specific commitments made as a part of this campaign include Billie Eilish’s full 2022 tour being climate positive, Dead & Company promising to eliminate 500% of its 2021 tour carbon footprint, Dave Matthews Band planting one million trees; Shawn Mendes committing to making his future tours carbon negative; AJR hosting shows powered by renewable energy; Forest Hills Stadium making its full 2021 concert season climate positive; and CID Presents funding regional clean energy and carbon mitigation projects from its 2022 events in Riviera Cancún, Mexico.

Pollstar recently wrote a feature about REVERB, which has been working to make the touring industry more sustainable since 2004. The organization recently helped the Lumineers organize the first “climate positive” tour by adding a fee onto each ticket to contribute to a number of carbon-offsetting programs and by reducing its own footprint through a series of measures that can be implemented on various tours, and are updated as best practices continue to be shared.

Some of the ways REVERB helps tours reduce their footprints include from working with a chef to coordinating the arrival of locally sourced, organic produce, dairy and other food at every stop; to helping analyze tour emissions by looking at bus routing, fuel consumption, hotel rooms, fan travel, and plane rides; to working with volunteers at every tour stop to discuss sustainability and other issues important to the artist with fans at the REVERB Action Village before the show.

Gardner said that, while the biggest numerical part of making a tour climate positive is the support of carbon-fighting projects and businesses, it is important that supporting such projects is not seen as a license to continue with business as usual, and that the industry must continue to change its practices and engage audiences and its own members in the conversation.

“We have been alone for too long we want to share best practices, we want people to listen,” Gardner said. “It is going to take all of us for significant change to occur.”

Gardner said the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called for significant changes to global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and to get to net-zero by 2050, a goal which will require fare more than the “usual suspects” in the industry who have always made sustainability a personal priority, and the Music Climate Revolution is an attempt to engage as many parts of the industry as possible.

The priority, Gardner said, is still to find artist partners, as REVERB has found that once the artist is committed, they are able to make many changes and get many other members of their teams on board. In order for artists to be listed as partners for the Music Climate Revolution, Gardner said there is an approval process to make sure that substantial action is being taken.

Some new partners already joining the Revolution include Earthgang, Jason Isbell and the award-winning Broadway Musical HADESTOWN, and Gardner said he was very excited to see new faces from new corners of the music industry, and that there are a number of other potential partners in the approval pipeline.

REVERB also has a number of Nonprofit partners that help organize the different kinds of individual action fans can take through its website. That list of partners includes Oxfam, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Natural Resources Defense Council, World Wildlife Fund, Black Music Action Coalition, The Solutions Project and EarthShare. There are also a number of industry partners including Warner Music Group, UTA, Outside Lands, Calfornia Roots Festival and Brushfire Records.

When speaking to Pollstar Gardner said even in just the few hours the campaign had been publicly announced he was already seeing existing and new partners stepping up their sustainability efforts, which he already considers a major success.

“The impact stats of what we have done to date on the website … soon those are going to skyrocket,” Gardner said. “Please join us! This is a positive campaign, and all of us doing something can have a huge cumulative effect.”