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Cultural Industries and the Environmental Crisis pp 37–49Cite as

The Environmental Sustainability of the Music Industries

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Abstract

This chapter 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 chapter 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.

Keywords

  • Music
  • Musical instruments
  • Recording
  • Waste

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Fig. 4.1
Fig. 4.2

Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that my approach to live music ecology stands in contrast to that of Huib Schippers and the Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures Project funded by the Australian Research Council. Schippers does not place a similar emphasis on materiality, interdependence, and sustainability in his theorization of musical ecosystems. He also uses the term ‘sustainability’ in a different sense, focusing on the sustainability of musical cultures as intangible cultural heritage rather than any concerns relating directly to environmental sustainability (see Schippers 2015).

  2. 2.

    Julie’s Bicycle presentation slides for Fields of Green roundtable workshop, 16 October 2015.

  3. 3.

    Economic costs were researched by Matt Brennan with assistance from Paul Archibald (methodology, sources, datasets published in Brennan and Archibald 2019). Environmental costs were researched by Kyle Devine (methodology, sources, and datasets published in Devine 2019).

  4. 4.

    This can be evidenced by reading through trade publications such as Music Trades from the turn of the twentieth century.

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  1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Matt Brennan

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Correspondence to Matt Brennan .

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  1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Kate Oakley & Mark Banks & 

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Brennan, M. (2020). The Environmental Sustainability of the Music Industries. In: Oakley, K., Banks, M. (eds) Cultural Industries and the Environmental Crisis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49384-4_4

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