Billie Eilish isn’t right here for artists who put out a number of distinctive vinyls for his or her albums, except they accomplish that in a sustainable method.
The Grammy winner and her mother, Maggie Baird, lately sat down with Billboard to debate how she’s continuously preventing for sustainability in her profession — and has been since earlier than she grew to become well-known. For her 2022 Happier Than Ever tour, she partnered with REVERB, a nonprofit that addresses environmental issues within the music trade, to serve plant-based meals for the artists and crew. Throughout her Lollapalooza set in 2023, she partially used zero-emissions battery techniques on-site to arrange a short lived “photo voltaic farm.”
Through the dialog, Eilish opened up about one explicit apply within the music trade that she finds utterly “wasteful”: placing out a number of, distinctive vinyls for upcoming albums.
“We reside at the moment the place, for some motive, it’s crucial to some artists to make all types of various vinyl and packaging … which ups the gross sales and ups the numbers and will get them extra money,” she instructed the publication. “I can’t even categorical to you the way wasteful it’s. It’s proper in entrance of our faces and persons are simply getting away with it left and proper.”
She defined that she finds it irritating as a result of she’s somebody who goes out of her strategy to be as sustainable as doable and tries to encourage everybody on her workforce to do the identical.
“Then it’s among the greatest artists on the planet making fucking 40 totally different vinyl packages which have a special distinctive factor simply to get you to maintain shopping for extra,” the Oscar winner continued. “It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re nonetheless at some extent the place you care that a lot about your numbers and also you care that a lot about creating wealth — and it’s all of your favourite artists doing that shit.”
Whereas Eilish herself put out a number of vinyls of her Happier Than Ever album, she used one hundred pc recycled black vinyl; colour variants have been constructed from recycled scraps and the information have been packaged in shrink wrap fabricated from sugarcane. Different artists don’t usually go to those lengths for his or her vinyls.
Baird identified that’s seemingly a systemic downside within the music trade as a result of, as Eilish talked about, having totally different information advantages gross sales and will increase an artist’s place on the Billboard charts. She famous that she’d wish to see limits on vinyl musicians can put out, for instance, not more than 4 colours, or another rule as a result of it appears unfair to fault an artist for simply “enjoying the No. 1 sport.”
“I used to be watching The Starvation Video games, and it made me give it some thought, as a result of it’s like, we’re all going to do it as a result of [it’s] the one strategy to play the sport,” Eilish shared. “It’s simply accentuating this already sort of tousled method of this trade working.”
An artist who is understood for releasing a number of variations of her albums on vinyl is Taylor Swift. Most lately, she introduced 4 variants of her upcoming album, The Tortured Poets Division, every of which had a special cowl and one distinctive tune, encouraging followers to purchase all 4.
