◼ BUSINESS Bloomberg Businessweek March 9, 202016
● The legendary GE CEO is remembered by
his biographer, our former executive editorThe Real
Jack Welch
THE BOTTOM LINE The music concert business wants to be
greener. But touring, which brought in $10 billion in 2018, requires
plenty of travel—and generates lots of waste.The telephone call came unexpectedly on a
Sunday night in early March 2002. Jack Welch was
on the line, his raspy voice as familiar as any I had
ever heard. After all, I had spent a full year with
him, more than 1,000 hours face to face, helping to
write his memoir,Jack: Straight From the Gut, pub-
lished almost six months earlier.
As was typical of Jack, the legendary chief exec-
utive of General Electric Co. who died on March 1
at the age of 84, he got to the point quickly. He
wanted me to know theWall Street Journalwould
publish a story the following morning that would
disclose a personal relationship he was having with
the editor of theHarvard Business Review.
What came next was even more surprising than
his revelation. “If in any way you’re disappointedStaying off the
road is “not
necessarily
a short-term
option for
many artists
who depend
on touring for
a living”been able to compensate for the collapse in CD
and downloaded music sales. “Taking the decision
to stop touring is quite a radical one,” says Chiara
Badiali, researcher at Julie’s Bicycle, a London-
based organization that offers tools to track and
lower the carbon footprint in creative industries.
“It’s not necessarily a short-term option for many
artists who depend on touring for a living.”
Although planes are known to be massive emis-
sions producers, tours that exclude air travel
still leave a carbon footprint. A project led by
Popakademie, a German university dedicated to
popular music and its business, tracked the emis-
sions from a 2014 tour by indie band We Invented
Paris. The group hit European cities including
Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich, with the musicians and
their equipment transported by van. The analysis
showed that roughly a third of the tour’s carbon
footprint came from audience travel, and another
third from a venue’s power consumption.
Even when concerts are aggressive about being
more sustainable—Britain’s Glastonbury Festival,
which has a capacity of 210,000, has been boost-
ing its use of clean energy—the impact of audience
travel can easily swamp their efforts. For bigger
acts, this can represent as much as 80% of the car-
bon footprint, according to a 2015 study assess-
ing the environmental impact of U.K. festivals by
Powerful Thinking, an events industry nonprofit.
“We have no leverage” on audience travel, says
Delphine de Labarriere, who oversees sustainabil-
ity at Stade de France, an 80,000-capacity soccer
stadium near Paris that’s also the biggest music
venue in the country.
Part of the solution is making sure the venue is
easily accessible by public transportation. About
65% of Stade de France’s audience comes this way,
including VIPs, de Labarriere says. The arena also is
implementing operational changes, such as banning
single-use plastics for VIP receptions. Transitioning
to water fountains instead of selling plastic water
bottles will be its next goal, she says. The venue has
even started working with a local provider for its
flower adornment in VIP lounges after noticing that
90% of all of the cut flowers were imported.
Live Nation, the world’s largest concert pro-
moter, has a similar approach. It has removed
6 million plastic straws from its owned and oper-
ated venues and eliminated the use of 175,
single-use bottles by installing water refill stations.
Lucy August-Perna, head of sustainability for the
venues it owns, says the company is investigating
ways to reduce its energy use. “That’s what we can
control and where we can make an impact,” she
says. Yet most of the more than 30,000 shows LiveNation promoted in 2019 were at venues owned by
other companies, which may not have the same
resources to overhaul their approach, she says.
The Dave Matthews Band, which was des-
ignated a Goodwill Ambassador by the United
Nations Environment program, will use nontoxic
cleaning products and a reusable water bottle ser-
vice on its upcoming tour, in addition to plant-
ing the 1 million trees to offset carbon emissions
from fan transportation, as well as its own flights.
Still, even the most green-conscious bands must
balance their desire to be more sustainable against
the financial necessity of touring. “The reason we
are musicians is because we want to share it with
others,” says Flavian Graber, lead singer of We
Invented Paris. “I absolutely think you can go on
tour and have a concern about the environment.
It’s a matter of just keeping our footprint as low
as possible.” �Angelina Rascouet and Lucas Shaw