Music and
Sustainability
Project outcomes
The Music and Sustainability project resulted in outcomes on a range of themes outlined below.
1. The environmental sustainability of the music industries - an overview
This paper discusses the environmental sustainability of the music industries. A world where music does not have an environmental impact is a world without music. I do not want a world without music, and it is not my intention to ruin one of life’s great pleasures – the enjoyment of music – by pointing out its environmental impact. But music can be framed not just in terms of its value, but also its cost - including the whole range of production and consumption behaviours that those who participate in music often take for granted. This paper therefore explores three key sectors of the music industries – recorded music, live music, and musical instruments – and considers them from the perspective of environmental sustainability and political ecology. It also offers a critique of the assumption that the growth of these industries is an unquestionable good.
2. The recorded music industry
What is the cost of music in the so-called Anthropocene? Brennan and Devine approach this question by focusing on the case of sound-recording formats. We consider the cost of recorded music through two overlapping lenses: economic cost, on the one hand, and environmental cost, on the other. The article begins by discussing how the price of records has changed from the late 19th to the 21st century and across the seven most economically significant playback formats: phonograph cylinder, gramophone disc, vinyl LP, cassette tape, compact disc, digital audio files on hard drive, and streaming from the cloud. Our case study territory is the United States, and we chart the gradual decline in the price of recorded music up to the present. We then examine the environmental and human costs of music by looking at what recordings are made out of, where those materials come from, and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Despite what rhetorics of digital dematerialisation tell us, we show that the labour conditions in the digital electronics and IT industries are as inhumane as ever, while the amount of greenhouse gases released by the US recording industry could actually be higher today than at the height of any previous format. We conclude by asking the obvious (but by no means straightforward) question: what are musicians and fans to do?
The cost of music (short film, 13 minutes)
How much should we pay artists for listening to their music? (video, 4 minutes)
What are the environmental costs of recorded music? (video, 7 minutes)
3. The live music industry
This paper offers a backstage perspective on the physical and organizational structures of touring and concertgoing. In doing so, it addresses the global challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability through the lens of the live music sector, focusing on the UK as a case study. More specifically, the chapter investigates how actors in the live music industry—made up of artists, audiences, and organizers—perceive and address climate change and sustainability, one of the most urgent problems facing the wider global community. The chapter develops the concept of a “live music ecology,” arguing that an ecological approach to live music draws attention to three other factors: (1) the materiality of the infrastructures and buildings in which live music happens; (2) the interdependence between the actors who identify themselves as operating within a music scene versus other nonmusic work spheres who have a significant impact on live music; and finally (3) the sustainability of live music culture, where all the factors above contribute to meet the needs of the present ecology “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The underlying argument of this chapter is that the infrastructures at play in the production of live music are often directly at odds with the escapist ideology often found in live music performances as cultural events. Indeed, the chapter highlights some of the ideological contradictions embodied by concert spaces that style themselves as utopian and “green.” Ultimately, it argues that we need more efficient and sustainable musical infrastructures, and that a crucial part of achieving that goal involves developing critical infrastructural imaginaries.
4. The musical instruments industry
What environmental sustainability issues emerge from the history of musical instruments as a form of material culture? A focus on materials has long been at the heart of musical instrument research, of course, but what one might call the “ecological turn” in music scholarship opens up possibilities for increased dialogue between these two fields. This paper discusses the materials used to manufacture mass-produced musical instruments and raises questions about the sustainability of the contemporary musical instrument industry, focusing on the drum kit as a case study. As with other instruments, the drum kit's history is part of a larger narrative of the growth of the musical instrument manufacturing industry over the last two centuries from a small guild-based industry to a globalized mass production industry. Following recent work on the ecology of musical instrument making (Allen 2012; Dawe 2015) and recorded music formats (Devine 2015), I want to suggest framing shifts in the contemporary musical instrument industry into three historical eras grouped by the principal materials used to manufacture instruments: (1) renewable materials (i.e. wood, metal, etc.); (2) non-renewable plastics and e-waste; and (3) data.