What is the Green Music Alliance™?

The Green Music Alliance is an organization founded in 2008 for music industry companies and artists who agree that it is time for us to examine the way we do business, create products, promote music, sell music and influence our fans. Also, the Green Music Alliance is for music fans who want to know what they can do for the planet.  Members of the Green Music Alliance strive to reduce the carbon footprint of their companies and raise awareness within our businesses and fans about how to reduce our impact on the environment.

Music and musicians have influenced others and created social change throughout the decades.   With this in mind, we decided that the music business could do more if we had an organization and community aimed at increasing awareness and providing resources to help us “do our part” in reducing our impacts to the environment while influencing our fans to do the same.

Our goals are simple:

1. Raise awareness,
2. Highlight green resources,
3. Identify “greener” music business alternatives,
4. Help you reduce your carbon footprint, and
5. Grow a green-aware online music community.

The GreenMusicAlliance.org website serves as our virtual town hall and features Green Music News, Green Music Services, Green Music Online Resources and a Green Music Community bulletin board.

Membership is free.

What is a Carbon Footprint?

[Courtesy of Wikipedia.com and CarbonFootprint.com]

A carbon footprint is a “measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide”. It is meant to be useful for individuals and organizations to conceptualize their personal (or organizational) impact in contributing to global warming. A conceptual tool in response to carbon footprints are carbon offsets, or the mitigation of carbon emissions through the development of alternative projects such as solar or wind energy or reforestation. A carbon footprint can be seen as a subset of earlier uses of the concept of ecological footprints.
The carbon footprint can be efficiently and effectively reduced by applying the following steps:

• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to accurately determine the current carbon footprint. The goal of LCA is to compare the full range of environmental damages assignable to products and services, to be able to choose the least burdensome one.
• Identification of hot-spots in terms of energy consumption and associated CO2-emissions
• Optimisation of energy efficiency and, thus, reduction of CO2-emissions and reduction of other GHG emissions contributed from production processes
• Identification of solutions to neutralise the CO2 emissions that cannot be eliminated by energy saving measures.

The last step includes carbon offsetting; investment in projects that aim at the reducing CO2 emissions, for instance biofuels or tree planting activities.

Where can I find out more?

Visit the Green Resources page on our site or browse through the blog posts on our main home page to find many online information resources about how to “be more green” and reduce your Carbon Footprint.