Billie Eilish
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Billie Eilish isn’t here for artists who put out multiple unique vinyls for their upcoming albums unless they do so in a sustainable way.
The Grammy winner and her mom, Maggie Baird, recently sat down with Billboard to discuss how she’s constantly fighting for sustainability in her career — and has been since before she became famous. For her 2022 Happier Than Ever tour, she partnered with REVERB, a nonprofit that addresses environmental concerns in the music industry, to serve plant-based meals for the artists and crew. During her Lollapalooza set in 2023, she partially used zero-emissions battery systems on-site to set up a temporary “solar farm.”
During the conversation, Eilish opened up about one particular practice in the music industry that she finds completely “wasteful”: Putting out multiple, unique vinyls for upcoming albums.
“We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging … which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money,” she told the publication. “I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is. It is right in front of our faces and people are just getting away with it left and right.”
She explained that she finds it frustrating because she’s someone who goes out of her way to be as sustainable as possible and does the best she can to try to encourage everyone on her team to do the same.
“Then it’s some of the biggest artists in the world making fucking 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more,” the Oscar winner continued. “It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money — and it’s all your favorite artists doing that shit.”
While Eilish herself put out multiple vinyls of her Happier Than Ever album, she used 100 percent recycled black vinyl, color variants were made from recycled scraps and the records were packaged in shrink wrap made of sugarcane. Other artists don’t typically go to these lengths for their vinyls.
Baird pointed out that’s likely a systemic problem in the music industry because, as Eilish mentioned, having different records benefits sales and increases an artist’s position on the Billboard charts. She noted that she’d like to see limits on vinyl musicians can put out, like no more than four colors, or some other rule because it seems unfair to fault an artist for just “playing the No. 1 game.”
“I was watching The Hunger Games, and it made me think about it, because it’s like, we’re all going to do it because [it’s] the only way to play the game,” Eilish shared. “It’s just accentuating this already kind of messed up way of this industry working.”
An artist who is known for releasing multiple variations of her albums on vinyl is Taylor Swift. Most recently, she announced four variants of her upcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, each of which had a different cover and one, unique song, encouraging fans to buy all four.
