Just when you thought this year’s festival season was nearly over, a few festivals with green awareness goals remain.  The Project 30-90 Green Art and Music Festival on Saturday, September 5th in New Orleans is one.   As they outline on their Green page, they have an eye on many of the key elements required to minimize the environmental impact of a music festival including the challenges with power, trash, transportation and merchandise.  Additionally, they have an education goal and are including educational and non-profit organizations in their vendor village.   Music festivals have the power to raise awareness and provide music fans with the information they need to live “more green” lives.

From the Project 30-90 site:

Project 30-90 is an environmentally conscious music festival being held in New Orleans on September 5, 2009. Our stages will be run on solar and wind turbine power, we’ll offer paperless green tickets, recycling, carbon offsets and more. Put simply, we are going to rock your world and leave no carbon footprint behind.

Project 30-90 Founder Don Kelly speaks on who and how he selected the bands that are playing at the inaugural 30-90 Festival:

The Saturday music line-up starts at 3pm…

[Read more →]

With his 2009 release “Evolver” and his green summer tour, John Legend climbed to the top of the Billboard Green 10 list for 2009.  By working with Reverb and the Show Me Campaign to make his tour green as possible, John has done his part this summer in both taking action and raising awareness among his music fans.  Visit the Projects page on Reverb for more green artists.

You can preview and buy songs from John Legend’s album “Evolver” using the player below.

Jack Johnson is continually hailed as one of the most green artists.  The on-going education he provides to the music industry and fans about what it means to be a green artist inspires and challenges us all.   For more about what you can do as a green touring artist to both reduce and offset your carbon impacts visit the “greening” section on Jack’s website.

1% For The Planet is a global movement of 1236 businesses and musicians who giveback one percent of their sales toward their choice of over 1800 environmental charities, services programs.  1% for the Planet exists to build and support an alliance of businesses financially committed to creating a healthy planet.  The YouTube video below shows Jack’s continued support for 1% For The Planet.

With a continued focus on European youth, the Play To Stop campaign, launched a new viral video called “Demand action until you´re blue in the face.” The video is also part of Oxfam’s Be Humankind campaign.   You can visit the Oxfam Blue Faces site to view over 7000 user submitted blue faces photos taken at U.K music festivals.

The song featured throughout the video is “Right Here Right Now” by Fatboy Slim available on iTunes.

MTV and Climate Action of the European Commission recently launched a campaign to win over the minds of today’s music loving youth with the launch of the Play to Stop website and series of concerts performed by top talent.

Moby’s recent free shows began at the Hotel Rival in Stockholm, Sweden on Thursday, August 20th.   Although the campaign is targeted at 11 European countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK), the MTV concerts will only be performed in Budapest, Stockholm and Copenhagen.

While supplies last, free tickets are available just by sending an email to play4climate@mtvne.com.

If you care about the environment and are a music fan or artist then maybe you should be writing for us?   Have you used WordPress before or do you have your own blog site?  Are you a freelance writer with some time on your hands?  Why not work with us to keep up with everything that is going on green in the music business.  Help us build awareness and build our online community.

Visit our New Member Request page to sign up today.

We have had our MySpace page for a while and thank everyone who has become our friends there, but we are certainly late to the twitter-revolution.   So finally we are joining the conversation on Twitter as “green_music“. We have added a twitter widget to our blog sidebar and are starting to follow many of the green organizations, resources, services and artists that we have written about.  Also, you can click the small “Tweet This” icon at the bottom of any of our posts to quickly tweet about one of our posts… and raise awareness about the Green Music Alliance

We look forward to you following us too.

On August 17th, a new study (Christopher L. Weber, Jonathan G. Koomey, and H. Scott Matthews) was released called “The Energy and Climate Change Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods.”  While we might all agree that the conclusion that going digital reduces your carbon footprint is rather obvious, it’s worth a moment to read the study to better understand the many components of the traditional CD manufacturing and delivery processes that add up to the larger carbon footprint of this now fading music format.

This study assesses the energy and CO2 emissions associated with several alternative methods for delivering one album of music to a final customer, either via traditional retail or e-commerce sales of compact discs or via a digital download service. We analyze a set of six (3 compact disc and 3 digital download) scenarios of the delivery of one music album from the recording stage to the consumer’s home in either CD or digital form. The scenarios were:

1. Album published on CD and delivered via traditional retail methods
2. Album published on CD and delivered by light-duty truck through an online e-tail provider
3. Album published on CD and delivered by express air through an online e-tail provider
4. Album downloaded as mp3/mp4 files from an online music service and used digitally
5. Album downloaded as mp3/mp4 files from an online music service and burned to CD-R for digital and CD use (no CD packaging)
6. Album downloaded as mp3/mp4 files from an online music service and burned to CD-R for digital and CD use, stored in individual CD packaging, i.e., slimline jewel cases