Milky Change A band's systemic change towards a better future.

​“Start somewhere, even if it’s small. One action will unlock another.”

Chiara Badiali, project manager for Julies Bicycle

The Sustainability on Tour miniseries in 4 Volumes

Over the course of the next weeks, I will offer you some deeper insight into the Milky Chance tour life. All clips have been filmed during the recent Mind the Moon European Tour in spring 2020. I will show you how we get around, what we bring with us, where we chill and sleep, the way the stage set up works, and so on…

The goal here is to give you a better idea of the many topics an artist (and not only the artist, but we’ll get to that) needs to consider on the road to “green touring”. 

Excited? 

Let’s get to it!

Many pieces to a cake

While I gave you a rough overview of the live music industry's carbon emissions in my last blog post, I also pointed out that there are 3 main pieces to the cake that describes the footprint of live music. 

The band (everything they can influence directly), the venue (which an artist can influence indirectly), and the audience (this is where you come in). 

Alternatively, as shown in the Green Touring Guide, you could also categorize the impacts by the following: mobility, venue, catering, hospitality, merchandise & communication.

First up: let’s talk about merchandise

So for this Volume 1 of our Sustainability on Tour miniseries, I wanted to circle back to one of the first topics of our Milky Change project: merchandise. 

Though merchandise isn’t the biggest factor of a tour, it still embodies quite a considerable amount of carbon associated with live shows. Also, merchandise is something an artist can influence directly by deciding what and how merchandise is produced or even if it is “necessary” at all. To refresh your memory of our decision-making process about merchandise for the Mind the Moon tour, click here. 

But with no further ado, go watch the video below and enjoy Clemens giving you a little tour of our merchandise stand. 

Next up...

... we will dig into some of the issues an artist can influence indirectly, but ultimately, are dependent on the cooperation of other parties within the industry. Featuring Philipp on a hunt for plastic, I will talk about catering and tour riders in the next blogpost. 

Stay tuned!