CULTURE/ENVIRONMENT
A coalition of major music streamers and the UN hope millions of dollars can be channelled to conservation when artists use the sounds from nature in their songs.
It’s being called Sounds Right and will give artists who use stock recordings of animals or the weather the option of putting a ‘feat. NATURE’ credit on any of their songs on streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal and SoundCloud, which would then channel royalties to organisations working for conservation and ecological restoration or to control pollution.
Whether it’s the blackbirds singing on Paul McCartney’s 1968 track of the same name, the crack of thunder to open Enya’s ‘Storms in Africa II’, or the crow’s cawing in advance of Florence + the Machine’s ‘Dreaming’, nature sounds add extra creative flourishes to an artist’s vision.
The initiative is being directed by legendary music producer Brian Eno on behalf of the Museum of the United Nations.
“You have to make a decision about whether you are going to make them sound more like instruments, or whether you’re going to pull the music towards those things. And I think the second option is, actually, kind of more interesting,” Eno told the BBC on the occasion of both Sounds Right and the release of a David Bowie remix that includes animal sounds such as wild pigs and hyenas. “Hopefully it’ll be a river, or a torrent, or a flood of royalties — and then what we do is distribute that among groups of people who are working on projects to help us deal with the future.”
The first group of artists to give featuring credits to Nature include Bowie, London Grammar, MØ, Tom Walker, Ellie Goulding, and Aurora. Check out the playlists on Spotify.
The fund is anticipated to draw in US$40 million from 600 million streams. At the moment, exactly how the money will be spent is unclear, however, a group of conservation and ecosystem consultants have identified several at-risk ecosystems that will benefit from ‘feat. Nature’ credits. These include Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands, Indo-Burma, Borneo, Sumatra, the Philippines, the tropical elevations of the Andes Mountains, and the Atlantic Forest biome in Brazil.
ABOVE A screenshot of the ‘feat. NATURE’ playlist
PHOTO Spotify