“…The arts share an industrial base with other sectors in the global economy. We heat and cool, lighten and darken, open and close our buildings, manufacture spectacles... We tour and travel and our audiences follow in huge numbers. All this requires energy – significant amounts of it – and most of it is drawn from fossil fuels. Art has a real carbon footprint.”

Long Horizons: An Exploration of Art + Climate Change, Julie’s Bicycle

A carbon footprint is "the total set of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an organization, event or product", i.e. the amount of carbon dioxide (or its equivalent of other GHGs) emitted. The global average footprint is 4 tonnes/year per person. In Australia the average is 20 tonnes/year.

The music industry is one of the contributors to these emissions. “First Step: UK Music Industry Greenhouse Gas Emissions 2007”, written by the Environmental Change Institute and Julie’s Bicycle, reports that the UK music industry alone creates at least 540,000 tonnes of GHG per year.

First Step: UK Music Industry Greenhouse Gas Emissions 2007, Environmental Change Institute, and Julie’s Bicycle

Live music (especially audience travel) is the biggest polluter (around ½ of music emissions), followed by venue energy use, and CD lifecycle emissions.

CD lifecycle emissions are the second biggest GHG emitter in the music industry.

Studies comparing emissions from physical CDs versus digital downloads have produced conflicting evidence due to a lack of research into the impacts of digital music. When you download a song you download a file that is stored somewhere in a data centre. To put this in context, power grids are often designed around data centres because of their huge energy requirements. Further research must be undertaken to fully understand this issue.

Written by Austep Music, 2010

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