It’s that time of year again! All the sad, acoustic cover versions rejected for this year’s John Lewis are being released at once. Google searches for ‘who were the Waitresses?’ are having their annual spike. And Music Ally is continuing our series of 2022 recap posts on music industry trends.

Today, what we’re looking back on is the industry’s efforts to tackle the climate emergency by reducing its emissions, be they from touring, physical releases or the day-to-day business of running music companies.

The scale of the challenge is daunting, but there are a lot of efforts going on in our industry to take inspiration from. Here are some of the examples we wrote about in 2022. And remember, you can see our full series of recap posts here: industry data, acquisitions, K-Pop moments, TikTok talking points, web3 thoughts and more.

04 Multiple efforts to make records more sustainable

The vinyl revival in recent years has been exciting, but it brings with it some questions about the sustainability of this format and its production processes. However, we were interested to see several companies working on technologies to tackle this challenge too in 2022.

In July, Evolution Music showed off its first bioplastic vinyl record, which it said produced far less toxic emissions than the standard PVC process. The tech was later tested out by a split-12″ record from Michael Stipe and Beatie Wolfe.