Here comes Issue #5 of The Hum, a shorter issue with a feature on the Music Sustainability Summit.
In issue 4, we discussed new concepts from CES, the impact of the compact disc, the data of a song, and AI regulation through the ELVIS Act and related policies.
In this issue we cover key takeaways from the Music Sustainability Summit which took place in LA last Monday. We also explore the history of the mp3—a format emerging from ear research—as part of the portable audio series.
Check our about page to learn about who we are and why we started The Hum.
Music Sustainability Summit
This past week we attended the Music Sustainability Summit, the first of its kind in North America, presented by the Music Sustainability Alliance (MSA). The one-day summit located at The Novo in Los Angeles, CA (without a virtual option) brought together panels of various music industry leaders, climate scientists, non-profits, and more to discuss what is currently being done and what gaps exist to tackle climate change. With a full day of scheduled talks and networking, this short event set a precedent for long term industry investment. Here are the key themes we took from the summit:
The Artist is the CEO
Artists and influencers are seen as key drivers individually and within the venues they perform for persuasive messaging if they are authentic in their approach. From various parts of the industry, leaders shared the idea that “music is the vehicle” for change whether it be a song, an interactive experience of climate change data, or through touring decisions. Baked into this logic of the artist in control is the industry’s assumption that the fan is the main stakeholder who must change. With the exception of the artist who used a solar trailer and other clean energy resources to power their recording process and music video shoot, a common idea for artists’ direct actions was simply a green rider — the document the artist brings to the venue of all their requirements for themselves during the show including food, beverages, and equipment.
Festivals are built like cities, but cities already exist
Live music can be made more sustainable by reframing events in the context of existing resources and strategic partnerships. In the panel discussing fan travel and transportation, bus and ride share programs provided at the city and festival level were brought up as current strategies to reduce the emissions for fan transportation to and from distant events. The festivals themselves, often those in remote areas like Coachella, necessitate a level of resources that mirror a small city. One of the panelists commented that “cities already exist,” and they are the ones who are permitting these festivals and their associated traffic to emit more than necessary. Denver is one city that supports sustainable events and provides resources for event planners. There’s a shared responsibility among event planners, municipal governments and public resources, and fans which should be met with concerted partnership rather than band-aid bussing solutions that hike up ticket prices.
Condensed lead times carry an environmental impact
Planning early and creatively can ensure live events, tour production, and power consumption stay in line with sustainable goals. A panel with people who manage domestic and international tours, stage production, and equipment hauling and transport discussed the challenges that delays can have on meeting emissions targets, as well as when artists delay decision making. Creating structures through 3D printing and inflatables were discussed as methods to enable custom experiences while reducing weight. Similarly, a panel about renewable energy surfaced the need to be flexible and strategic when it comes to powering large scale shows. Layering of grid power (where electricity sources differ across the U.S.), lithium batteries, and generators (diesel or the biofuel Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) can ensure that no single source is relied on. This layering strategy is advantageous given the variability of renewable energy availability across venues and the inconsistency of power load estimates. Both leaders in hauling and energy suggested a need for greater investment from the music industry in general to ensure their organizations can scale to meet the demands of their clients.
Quantifying sustainable actions to reach cost parity
Some industry leaders are not sure which sustainable actions to take due to lack of clear measurement standards and from higher costs associated with alternatives. Sustainable initiatives depend on accurate data in order to determine the financial impact of taking action, and what would need to change for those actions to become the economical choice. In the panel about hauling, one speaker brought up how sea freight is more sustainable than air transport, but because it travels at a slower pace, it costs more due to the cost to pay crew for a longer tour duration. Promoters discussed how monetizing sustainable action could become a selling point when bidding for venue locations with municipal permitters, public spaces, and local vendors. For tours that fail to meet their carbon neutral targets on the road, the cost of carbon offset purchases can add up due to challenges measuring carbon footprint. In a case study, leaders from major labels shared their plans for the Music Industry Climate Collective (MICC) as part of the Music Climate Pact with the goal of coming together to standardize how emissions are measured for the music industry.
As the summit concluded, the organizers suggested the MSA will hold webinars, working groups, and research later this year. Since the event followed the Chatham House Rule, we are reluctant to share names and organizations of panelists, but check out the speakers here and try to decipher who may have said what.
Tracing the history of portable audio
In this series we explore how portable audio changed the way we listen to music enabling it to become ubiquitous, intimate, and easily shareable. Read more about why we chose to tell its story.
Mp3: A solution, or a problem?
The story of the mp3 starts with the history of the telephone. By the 1920s, AT&T was filtering calls into audio bands for optimized speech in order to “fit” more than one call into a single phone line. Over the next 50 years, researchers at Bell Labs and other institutions developed models that used psychoacoustic masking (when louder sounds make softer sounds imperceptible) to achieve data compression on audio signals. The initial research focused mostly on the theoretical possibilities of perceptual coding, but these models and masking techniques set the foundation for the technologies required to make digital compression of sound possible.
In 1987, a team led by Karlheinz Brandenburg at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Germany combined the advances made over the previous decades on audio masking to develop the system and approach that eventually led to the mp3. Over the following years the system was refined and eventually achieved acceptable sound quality at effective compression rates (11 to 1 compression at a bit-rate of 128kbs).
By the early 90s, the team at Fraunhofer decided that to fully commercialize their new encoding system, they would have to create encoding and decoding tools as well as a file extension to make the file system commonplace and so, on July 14th, 1995, the mp3 extension was officially created. At first, mp3 encoding tools were very expensive and only accessible to large companies. Decoding tools, on the other hand, were made widely accessible in the hopes that more people would be able to use the new file extension. Early mp3 players, like Winamp, provided early users with an easy way to play mp3s that utilized these decoding tools.
By 1997 Fraunhofer’s encoding software was leaked into the world by a student with a stolen credit card. After this, the mass adoption—and mass ability to encode CDs into mp3s was unleashed into the world. In just a couple of years, mass p2p file sharing networks, like Napster, had created a way for millions of people to share their mp3 collections to others over the internet.
When mp3s started gaining mass adoption they faced stiff resistance from an industry that was at its peak revenue-generating era due to the CD. Labels and musicians alike sued users and platforms that were sharing mp3s, creating a rift between the formal industry and the informal industry that had emerged online.
Ultimately, the emergence of the mp3 spelled the end of the CD era, and started a phase for the music industry where revenues dropped to record levels and the industry faced an uncertain future. In time, other legal mp3 downloading platforms, like Apple’s iTunes store emerged and began to become accepted by the industry, helping restore some of the lost income due to piracy and file sharing. This era, however, created new ways for listeners to discover, collect, and share music that informed what was to come.
In our next entry we’ll talk about the iPod and the impact that portable mp3 players had on how we engage with and listen to music.
The Playlist