What Measuring the Carbon Footprint of a Rock Concert Reveals About Corporate Complicity

Some of music’s most exact measurements have been taken in relation to concerts. Spend any time looking at music from an environmental perspective and you are sure to learn that live music accounts for the majority of the industry’s carbon footprint. You will also quickly learn that most of that footprint comes from audience travel.

According to the latest and most comprehensive study ever undertaken on the subject, gigs generate over 14 million tons of emissions annually in the United States, accounting for 0.2 percent of overall greenhouse gases. In Britain, that number is more like 4 million tons and is good for 1 percent of total yearly emissions. Getting to those gigs accounts for over 60 percent of live music’s footprint in the United States and nearly 80 percent in Britain. Discovering that audience travel is “the single largest source” of music industry emissions is the report’s “key insight.”

This insight may be key, but it is not new. Singling out live music and audience travel in accounts of music’s carbon footprint has been industry orthodoxy for at least two decades—certainly since 2007, when both Radiohead and the arts-and-climate nonprofit Julie’s Bicycle published carbon audits of the music world. Radiohead’s efforts were focused on the band’s North American concerts, finding that “fan travel and consumption make up 86 percent of the theater tour and 97 percent of the amphitheater tour.” Julie’s Bicycle, meanwhile, in a sector-wide study that included recording, publishing, and more found that “live music performance together with audience travel account for three-quarters of the UK music industry’s emissions.”

Environmental thinking on live music encourages a form of atmospheric accounting where scrutiny of the personal trees passes for consideration of the political forest.

Musicians are not blameless here. Some touring acts, like Taylor Swift, catch flak for their private jet emissions and try to compensate through carbon offsetting. Others, like Massive Attack, pause or downscale their touring activities while seeking low-carbon options. “Artists should be held accountable for their travel,” according to interviewees in the recent study. And artists apparently agree. “Still,” say the interviewees, “their emissions are minutia when compared to that of fans.” It is only logical that if “fan travel is the largest source of GHG emissions in the live music industry,” then “efforts for reducing emissions should be largely directed there.” The report aims to “nullify the distracting, ill-informed mischaracterization of the emissions impact of artists” and make audiences responsible for developing “good habits” as they attend concerts. Admit one: Homo carbonicus.

None of these environmental reports looks exclusively at audiences. They all mention the impact of wider business practices like food and freight. They recognize the tangled and systemic character of the issues they face. But the category of audience travel comes up repeatedly in studies of live music’s carbon footprint—and it is never really questioned. The category is given. The only task is to measure it with greater precision and more impressive methods, so that the largest carbon reductions may be achieved. There will be successes on that front, even as its underlying beliefs about measurement and responsibility lift some eyebrows. But fixating on carbon in this way carries an unintended consequence. It preserves a false dichotomy between artists and audiences.

Performers on stages and attendees in venues are obviously engaged in different kinds of activity. But this surface difference papers over something more fundamentally shared. Most musicians and fans need jobs to make a living. Even very famous musicians are often contracted to sell their capacity to work. Although the carbon footprints of artists and audiences can obviously be measured separately and reckoned accordingly, both groups have to burn carbon in order to participate in social life. And most of them did not choose the economic arrangement that compels them to burn that carbon, that splits labor and leisure in this way, that organizes work and pleasure around certain kinds of mobility.

This setup sometimes authorizes cheap shots about the supposed irony that environmentally conscious musicians and fans would travel for concerts. It can permit low blows about events that promote environmentalism while also making claims on the environment. But does it count as insight to point out that people happen to be part of the reality they want to change? Is there really no festival without cruelty? Either way, environmental thinking on live music encourages a form of atmospheric accounting where scrutiny of the personal trees passes for consideration of the political forest. Focusing on audience travel is one more way that economic power disorganizes and discourages its potential opposition.

*

Homo carbonicus does not actually exist. It cannot be mapped onto any individual’s thoughts or actions or admitted to any concert. Rather, Homo carbonicus is a figurative abstraction, a collective consciousness, an interpersonal framework for defining problems and seeking solutions. If the go-to responses of this figure are responsibility and metrology, such instincts find stability in institutions that objectify certain calculative agencies in a wider audit culture. In other words, Homo carbonicus is part of a more general historical moment in which people have been transformed “into ‘auditable’ entities that focus their energies on doing ‘what counts’ rather than what is necessarily moral or right.”

These intuitions and institutions can operate differently depending on their scale and size, but they share some patterns of thought. One of the most important limitations here is that in such settings, instead of asking what counts, we assume we already know, and we focus instead on how to account. This explains the focus on audience travel in the carbon footprint of live music. It also helps explain the drive for ever more precise carbon calculators and ever more detailed atmospheric accounting in other industrial and cultural areas of music, while larger questions about carbon go unasked.

Custom carbon calculators are proliferating among independent music businesses and organizations. These range from free personal tools, like Onboard:Earth (a smartphone app that measures and tracks carbon emissions from musician and fan travel to concerts) to Green Your Noise (an online service that will estimate the emissions of everything from single concerts to larger tours and productions). Others follow membership and subscription models, both paid and not. Some hire consulting firms. One of the most visible tools here is the Independent Music Companies Association IMPALA Carbon Calculator, developed in collaboration with the nonprofit climate organization Julie’s Bicycle.

The IMPALA Carbon Calculator is tailored to independent record labels. It is designed to measure business activities deemed to be within IMPALA’s “operational boundary.” Such activities include office use, employee commuting, business travel, manufacturing, and distribution. Since launching in 2022, IMPALA’s calculator has become the tool of choice for 100 labels in twenty-one countries.

Music’s largest companies do things differently. Since around 2020, the three major music groups, Sony, Universal, and Warner, along with large streaming providers like Spotify, have all started reporting their emissions figures annually. An important starting point in the process is making splashy appointments in corporate social responsibility and environmental social governance. Warner, for example, hired Samantha Sims as head of ESG in 2021. Sims worked previously to establish a sustainability program at PVH, which owns clothing brands including Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Spotify hired Elizabeth Nieto in 2021 as leader of equity and impact, an umbrella role that covers initiatives in sustainability, social impact, and “early career pipeline” as well as “diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” Nieto’s prior jobs were with corporations like Citigroup, MetLife, and Amazon. Despite differences between the approaches of the independents and the majors, the back-end work of calculating carbon is essentially the same. To inventory their emissions, carbon’s bookkeepers first consult the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. The GHG Protocol is a process document. It helps businesses decide how and where to draw the lines of responsibility regarding emissions. These are the “operational boundaries”mentioned by IMPALA.

If responsibilization in one sense means accepting forms of self-monitoring and self-deprivation, taking responsibility in carbon accounting can also be an evasive maneuver.

Once those boundaries have been mapped and tallied—counting how many kilometers an organization’s employees have traveled through the air, how much electricity the offices have used, and so on—the second step of carbon accounting involves applying an emissions conversion factor in order to translate those figures into greenhouse gases. If your business is based in Britain, the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy will tell you that taking a domestic flight emits 0.24587 kilograms of carbon per passenger, per kilometer, or that staying in a hotel emits 10.4 kilograms of carbon per room, per night. If a company is based primarily in the United States, the conversion factors are likely to be different—and probably provided by the Environmental Protection Agency. A common, worldwide source for power usage is the International Energy Agency’s annual emissions factors reporting.

The GHG Protocol is known to be accurate when it comes to understanding the emissions from an organization’s onsite activities as well as the energy it purchases from the electricity grid. Yet the protocol is open to interpretation when it comes to accounting for emissions along an organization’s wider supply chains and waste streams. Still, it is less important in this context to question accuracy than the boundaries of responsibility.

For example, the GHG Protocol is what allows Spotify to stress that 99 percent of their emissions fall outside of their direct control. It is also what allows IMPALA to say that, although independent labels are answerable for the manufacturing emissions associated with their products (like records), “Our conclusion is that labels are not responsible for digital services’ emissions, in the same way that we are not responsible for the emissions of physical retailers’ stores on the high street.” This is a curious move, where an organization’s wider emissions are both ushered into the accounting picture and bounced out of it. If responsibilization in one sense means accepting forms of self-monitoring and self-deprivation, taking responsibility in carbon accounting can also be an evasive maneuver.

This is not surprising, given the history of the GHG Protocol. Although national carbon accounting and reporting goes back to 1995, with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, and while individual carbon footprints entered climate common sense only after 2004, when the idea was popularized by an ad campaign spearheaded by British Petroleum and the Ogilvy marketing agency, corporate carbon measurements and methods took shape in 1997. It was then that BP, wishing to reduce its emissions profile, found there was no standard system for measuring and reporting on carbon at the corporate level. When BP set out to develop such a standard, its efforts were noticed by Monsanto, General Motors, and the World Resources Institute (currently funded by the Jeff Bezos Earth Fund, the World Economic Forum, Walmart, and many others). The collaboration resulted in a 1998 report titled Safe Climate, Sound Business. This report, alongside additional collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (which represents not only BP but also DuPont, Shell, and more), laid the groundwork for the GHG Protocol.

While such efforts seem good if taken at face value, the fact that they are driven by market considerations means there are ulterior purposes at play. For example, when BP and other corporations talk about reducing their emissions, the word reduce is doing some heavy lifting. Corporations are often not seeking direct or absolute reduction. They are seeking the appearance of reduction that comes from emissions trading schemes—which are controversial at best, ineffective at worst, and everywhere ensconced in the eco-liberal conviction that capitalist markets, purified of their imperfections and filtered of their failures, are the solutions to their own problems.

Another ulterior purpose of the GHG Protocol and its carbon calculus is that, while it helps corporations appear environmentally virtuous by way of self-scrutiny and self-regulation, the goal is in fact to anticipate (and therefore lessen the impacts of) more strenuous scrutiny and regulations that may be introduced by governments and international organizations. This is straight out of the corporate playbook. Act, or be told how to act. Get out ahead and set the model. Then lobby policymakers to shape laws around the model that the corporations helped set in the first place.

Political scientists have observed that, when it comes to global environmental governance, the GHG Protocol and related initiatives are not only about getting ahead of regulations. Private actors, such as corporations and entrepreneurs, are themselves becoming the regulators—or at least they are exercising such strong influence over the regulatory process that the private actors are effectively in charge. In a way that mirrors (but inverts) responsibilization at the individual level, private firms are assuming “duties normally considered the province of governments.” Music’s largest businesses may not be as active or influential in such processes when compared to a corporation like BP, but music is part of the same story.

_______________________________

From Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change by Kyle Devine. Copyright © 2026. Available from Verso Books.