Nature officially listed as artist on Spotify as part of UN conservation initiative
Sounds Right is projected to raise more than $40 million for conservation projects in its first four years
Nature has officially been listed as an artist on Spotify as part of a UN initiative to raise money for global conservation efforts.
Launched on Earth Day (22nd April), Sounds Right will help fund climate action initiatives by donating a share of streaming royalties generated by any track crediting Nature as a featured artist to Earth/Percent, a climate-focused charity founded by Brain Eno.
As part of the initiative, musicians including Eno, Louis VI, UMI, Bomba Estéreo, Ellie Goulding, MØ, and London Grammar have released new music featuring nature sounds, with an official Spotify playlist showcasing the tracks.
The Museum for the United Nations (UN Live), who founded the initiative, will then distribute that money to conservation and restoration projects in the world’s “most precious and precarious ecosystems” under the guidance of the Sounds Right Expert Advisory Panel.
“It’s been fantastic to see so many brilliant artists excited to engage creatively with the sounds of nature and supportive of Sounds Right’s core objective to see that nature is fairly compensated for her musical contributions,” EarthPercent’s Co-Executive Director Cathy Runciman said in a statement.
“We know that many artists care deeply about protecting and restoring nature, and it’s a privilege to launch these collaborations via the Feat. NATURE playlist and together generate positive impact for biodiversity.”
UN Live hopes the project will raise $40 million (£32 million) within its first four years. Some of the funds current targets including forest preservation in Madagascar and efforts to prevent deep-sea mining.
As part of the first wave of releases, Brian Eno has remixed a version of his David Bowie collaboration ‘Get Real’ using the cries of hyenas, rooks and wild pigs, whilst Ellie Goulding has shared a rework of her track ‘Brightest Blue’ using sounds from the rainforests of Colombia.
“It’s a way of saying to artists, ‘We all use sounds like seagulls and waves and wind. Why don’t we pay nature a royalty?’” Eno explained in an interview with the BBC about the initiative.
“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.”
Alongside the tracks from global musicians, fans can listen to ambient sounds like wind, waves, rainstorms and birdsong, thanks to recordings from VozTerra and The Listening Planet, which is home to a large private library collection of nature sounds.
Check out NATURE’s Spotify page below, and browse Instagram for more information.
In 2022, artists including Brian Eno, Nile Rodgers, Debit, and more contributed tracks to an Earth Day charity compilation to raise funds for EarthPercent.
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