Taylor Swift can learn from Billie Eilish’s album drop

By Lara Williams

Not long ago, I lamented the lack of climate anthems. Perhaps we’ll find one on Hit Me Hard and Soft, the third studio album from Billie Eilish that’s due to drop on Friday.

Having grown up in a household that prioritized sustainability, Eilish is one of the few big pop stars who’s spoken out about the climate crisis — and taken action. Her star power has led to some big changes: In 2021, she agreed to wear an Oscar de la Renta gown to the Met Gala on the condition that the brand stop selling fur (as well as the ethical concerns, animal skins and leather come with large carbon footprints). Eilish’s latest move is to give Hit Me Hard and Soft an ostensibly eco-friendly album launch.

The discs will come in eight variants; the standard black records will be sourced from 100% recycled vinyl, while the seven colored flavors will be made from either ECO-MIX — a recycled compound made of leftovers from other colors — or BioVinyl, made of non-fossil fuel materials such as used cooking oil and industrial waste gasses. Packaging will be eco-friendly; cassette shells — yes, cassette tapes are back — will be made from recycled shell pieces. Merchandise clothing will use residual dead stock from prior productions or materials such as organic cotton or recycled polyester.

It’s funny to write about vinyl in the streaming age (in 2022, vinyl records outsold CDs in the US for the first time since 1987). Surely the most sustainable thing to do would be to not produce physical copies at all?

Nothing in life is free: Listening to music on a digital platform such as Spotify still has a modest carbon footprint. Five hours of streaming has the same carbon footprint as one plastic CD case, while 17 hours of streaming equals one vinyl record, Keele University researchers said in November 2021; that will have improved as data transmission and gadgets become more efficient and electricity grids rely more on energy storage and renewables.

But physical merchandise is a big cash cow for record labels and artists alike. That’s particularly true for those who haven’t made it to Billie Eilish-status and can’t make enough income from streams and touring alone; the profit margins for records and t-shirts are much higher. For mega stars, eschewing merch completely risks being out of the game when it comes to album charts and fan engagement.

This comes with a dark side: The rise of the vinyl variant. Knowing superfans are willing to buy anything and everything, some artists are arguably exploiting their audience — something Eilish criticized in an interview with Billboard Magazine:

“Some of the biggest artists in the world making f**king 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more. It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money.”

After a backlash from a particularly passionate fan group, Eilish clarified that she didn’t want to single out any particular artist with that comment — but I will.

Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, comes in five different versions so far: The original, a Target exclusive on clear vinyl, and three limited editions each featuring a different bonus track.

This has become the norm for Swift, though the strategy has been toned down from her 2022 Midnights release which got a little extreme. Four versions of the vinyl each had different covers which formed a clock if you purchased the quartet. There was an exclusive Target pressing in purple, with three bonus tracks. Then, hours after the album and these variants were released, another version of the album — Midnights (3am Edition) — dropped. Six months later, two new versions came along — all with slightly different track listings.

In terms of making money and moving up the charts, vinyl variants are a stroke of genius. But they’re wasteful and promote overconsumption.

While Eilish is also releasing her album in different colors, they all have the same track listings and were announced simultaneously, presumably in the hope that fans simply pick their favorite rather than buying the collection. For the more planet-friendly vinyl sector, having one of the world’s biggest pop stars throw their weight behind sustainable materials will no doubt be a huge moment for scaling up production. So while it’s not perfect, it’s a good start within the confines of a system that benefits those who pump out merch. As she said in that Billboard interview: “We’re all going to do it because [it’s] the only way to play the game.”

What about touring? On Eilish’s 2022 Happier Than Evertour, policies were in place to reduce waste and single-use plastic, and I’d expect initiatives for the next tour to build on those. But trash is only a tiny fraction of a live event’s carbon footprint. A few limited studies reach the same conclusion: audience travel is one of the biggest single contributor to a concert’s emissions. This remains a real challenge for the music industry in reducing its emissions, as well as the hardest for musicians to control.

Take Swift. By agreeing with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to make the country the only stop in south-east Asia, fans were incentivized to fly in from Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. In terms of emissions, it would have been better for her to make stops in more countries. I’ve just returned from Paris, where a remarkable number of American tourists were there to see her. The French capital maintains limitations on ticket resales, stopping concert prices soaring to the five-figure levels seen in the US; many Swifties found it cheaper to fly to Paris than to see her at home.

It’s unfair to blame Swift for being too popular. Price is dictated by supply and demand, and the demand for Eras tour tickets has been extreme. Plus, several US states actually require unlimited ticket resales by law. Yet Eilish has attempted to cap ticket prices by only allowing them to be resold on at face value via a Ticketmaster exchange platform. If prices remain equitable, that will hopefully encourage more sane travel distances.

No album launch and world tour can really be truly sustainable within a wider industry that rewards wasteful practices and with a polluting global transport system. Music’s emissions problem is far too big for one artist to tackle alone — but at least Eilish is trying.