MusicMatters In The Press

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Tour Industry’s Green Revolution
DMB, Madonna, Pearl Jam, Coldplay, and more team up to fight global warming
June 14, 2007

Matthews contacted MusicMatters, the marketing company that hooked the band up with Ben and Jerry’s, and said he was uncomfortable preaching to other people when he was doing so much damage. "Dave told us he felt hypocritical with all the buses and trucks he traveled with," recalls Michael Martin, director of MusicMatters. "He wanted to see if there was something he could do, but no one was doing anything." Matthews and MusicMatters spent the next several months researching the problem – canvassing energy experts, trucking companies and venues – and came up with a solution: "carbon-offsetting," by which Matthews would pay to build turbines and create renewable wind power in an effort to make up for the ozone-depleting CO2 generated by the band’s tours.

Every year, about 1,200 tour buses and trucks hit the road, according to MusicMatters, traveling more than 60 million miles, using 13 million gallons of fuel and releasing more than 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – about the amount 30,000 cars generate in a year.

Reverb and MusicMatters work with the growing network of eco-conscious vendors – and their client lists are multiplying. Unlike Reverb, MusicMatters, which also works on campaigns for brands like Clif Bar, is a for-profit business – and business is booming: The company has gone from fourteen to forty-eight clients in the last three years.

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New Companies, Resources Helping Musicians Go Green
By Taylor Grimes

SMART (Sustainable Minded Artists Recording & Touring) was developed as a resource for artists who want to ensure that their tours are as environmentally sound as possible. The organization provides valuable knowledge from leading environmental experts, as well as a partnership with eco-friendly vendors to provide discounted access to environmentally friendly products. The organization will also give a tour its SMART certification, provided the tour passes a number of requirements, including the use of biodiesel fuel on tour buses and the necessary availability of at least one line of organic merchandise for fans.

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Have Guitar, Will Recycle
March 15, 2007

A prominent for-profit organization in the field is MusicMatters, a marketing company in Minneapolis. It works with environment-minded clients, produces events and consults with artists like the Dave Matthews Band and Jack Johnson on a wide range of green touring practices, down to the use of nonpetroleum-based cosmetics onstage.

Michael Martin, the president of MusicMatters, which has been working on the issue for years, said that as recently as the late '90s the concept of carbon offsets was generally unknown, and biodiesel was "as hard to find as moonshine." So "greening" a tour meant making even smaller gestures, like inflating bus tires to specifications to achieve maximum fuel efficiency.

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Incubus Lightens Environmental Impact on Upcoming Light Grenades Tour
June 12, 2007

'We couldn't be more excited about Incubus' involvement in SMART, and the many things they're doing on the road and with their Make Yourself Foundation to truly make a difference. Our aim is to make it easy for bands like Incubus to keep their focus on the music, while we help make the whole touring process more environmentally friendly. The band's leadership and action will result in an even greater impact when their fans join them in action, and SMART helps to bring that message to fans in a way that complements the concert experience,' states Wren Aigaki-Lander, Director of Enviro Music Programs at MusicMatters.

Brandon Boyd from Incubus notes, "It's incredibly important to us as a band to preserve the environment when we're on tour. We now have the resources to not only neutralize our carbon footprint, but to help make the environment better each time we're on tour."

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Green Rocks
May 9, 2007

Rock the Earth, Jambase’s green site GreenBase, Bonnaroo, and TreeHugger are all leaders in blending music and the environment, but SMART (Sustainable Minded Artists Recording & Touring) at www.joinsmart.org, is showing these musicians exactly how to do it. SMART is an artist-led initiative, led by Jack Johnson and the Dave Matthews Band.

It began with MusicMatters almost two decades ago as a non-profit organization called "Concerts for the Environment." After working with Dave Matthews on the "One Sweet Whirled" global warming campaign, the group saw the need for more. They then worked with Jack Johnson and his wife to create the EnviroRider, an environmentally-sensitive version of the production and hospitality rider, in 2005, and worked with bands that include OAR, Xavier Rudd and the John Butler Trio to green their tours.

"SMART addresses five primary buckets of environmental activity, including resource use and efficiency, CO2 offsets, waste reduction and recycling, sourcing sustainable goods and services, and fan communications," said SMART Director Wren Aigaki-Lander.

The program offers a knowledge base offering the latest tools and technologies, a phone bank to address questions, the definitive music industry greening certification, and resources, such as buying pools, to reduce costs and information sharing among tour managers and artists. Musicians can visit the Web site and receive information on everything from how to get fans to carpool to the show to buying organic merchandise.

"It is a time-honored role for artists to lead the way in challenge and awareness campaigns around social and environmental issues," Aigaki-Lander said.

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Vedder rocking in a magical place
April 20, 2007

As stated by Eddie Vedder:
"There’s an organization that’s kind of coming together now… (Pearl Jam) has been looking into it and taking some meetings… called… a SMART project. They’re saying that we can start putting on shows with a lot of things in mind, looking at our environmental impact.

(Pearl Jam has) been doing things like carbon-offset stuff where we figure out what kind of carbon we put out into the atmosphere in the daily business of touring from buses and trucks and things. And then we try to offset that by preserving parts of rainforests and things like that.

This is just part of the SMART approach. They’re looking at waste reduction, the carbon-offset stuff. Sustainable sourcing of (tour merchandise) – which is (looking at) who makes your T-shirts, where the material comes from and (ways) to do that in such a way that’s a positive…

You’re doing all these things within the business of your group or your concert thing and you’re not being a liability to the planet. You can create a situation where this becomes the norm and you then end up making a large impact."

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How Green Is the Music?
Festivals, bands, and musicians seek environmental harmony
April 19, 2007

Wren Aigaki-Lander is the enviro music program manager for MusicMatters, a Minneapolis-based marketing firm that has worked on facilitating organic T-shirts and recycled-paper flyers printed with soy ink for festivals. But, she says, the carbon footprint from people traveling to the shows far outweighs that of the bands and their performances. For this reason, she said events like Lollapalooza, within cities with lots of public transit, have an advantage. Aigaki-Lander said her group is working to create incentives for people to carpool to shows, such as offering priority parking spots.

"Fully greening a tour is hard to do, said Jason Colton, who manages the band Gomez. "Many bands can only make enough per night to pay their expenses and put a little money in their pockets." Colton says that Gomez partnered with Clif Bar's GreenNotes campaign, which, in return for a little branding at shows and online, subsidizes the cost of greening Gomez's tours – including filling their bus with biodiesel, subsidizing the incremental cost of offering organic T-shirts, using recycled paper and soy inks for printed materials, and offsetting tour energy use with RECs. Other GreenNotes artists include O.A.R., Martin Sexton, Hot Buttered Rum, Garett Brennan, and Guster.

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The day the music went green
April 5, 2007

Closer to home, the organization MusicMatters is helping more bands make their music green. MusicMatters is locally based in Minneapolis, but that doesn't mean its reach in the music industry is small.

Artists like Jack Johnson, Dave Matthews Band, O.A.R., Gomez, Martin Sexton, Taking Back Sunday, Tea Leaf Green, Cloud Cult and Incubus are just a few of MusicMatters' clients over the years. MusicMatters helps bands in many ways that are similar to Reverb, including helping find local and organic foods on the road and finding green hotels to stay at around the country.

I talked with Chris Baumgartner of MusicMatters who explained, "It is a time-honored role for artists to speak out on concerns of the general population, and fans will follow artists' leads. The music industry has been at the forefront of many challenge and awareness campaigns: Bob Dylan and the Vietnam War; Bob Geldof and LiveAid; Bono's ONE campaign for AIDS awareness in Africa; Dave Matthews Band and global warming; and Bruce Springsteen and the Vote for Change tour."

What these bands do perhaps more effectively than all the public service messages about the environment is that they combine great music with the message. It's not so hip when Wal-Mart announces they're now green, but when the Dave Matthews Band does, students get it.

But while the musicians have always been at the forefront on emerging issues, global warming is unique. "I think the music industry speaks to all of us," says Baumgartner. "This is one of the first movements that they can't just talk about (like) saving Darfur or stopping AIDS. This issue is one that they are contributing to by the very nature of their business: selling CDs, merchandise, touring, etc. That is why this issue is so important to them."