2024 Women of Live: Brandy Schultz

Co-Founder & President | Sound Future

During her more than 15 years in the music industry, Brandy Schultz has dedicated herself toward fighting climate change and leveling out the music industry’s carbon footprint. This year, the Sound Future co-founder and president implemented new technologies, including the utilization of AI, to help push green initiatives forward.

“Launching our Surf and Turf restoration platform for live events and building our AI-generated Green Rider are two of our most impactful projects,” Schultz tells Pollstar. “I attribute this to our guiding principles of measurable, scalable change and our ‘green and green’ philosophy of making sure there is a business case for change before recommending it. We were tired of seeing artists and venues spend money on offsets and other performative solutions. I think we’ve done an excellent job of correcting for that with these two platforms.”

Married to The Lumineers’ Wesley Schultz, Brandy Schultz found a mentor in the band’s tour manager, Sarah Full. “She’s on our Board of Directors and has this unwavering, logic-driven approach to navigating the live business,” she says. “I never see her complain or get too shaken up when something happens, she just handles it.”

Looking ahead to the remainder of this year, Schultz and the rest of Sound Future are enthusiastic about expanding Surf and Turf, which puts donations towards bettering vetted land and ocean space to clean up air quality, water use efficiency, coastal resilience against erosion and climate disasters. “We are excited to grow our Surf and Turf initiative with our partners at ODE,” Schultz says. “They’ve built the coolest space-based monitoring platform for us to share visuals of the restoration progress. I’m unbelievably proud of it. Our AI Green Rider is going to be massive. We have the highest level developers working on it, and it will be able to make a business case for change to everyone from artists to the venues to municipalities.”

Schultz tells Pollstar she’s noticed concerts returning post-COVID are more mindful of their environmental impact. “We’ve seen incredible next-generation tech that will make events less impactful and improve the fan experience,” she says.