Yahoo News Indie Rockers AJR Spotlight Sustainability on Their Summer Tour
Adam Met is a busy man.
The 33-year-old rock star is not only the bassist of the multiplatinum band AJR, but he also holds a Ph.D. in human rights and sustainable development from the University of Birmingham. Though they may seem like opposite career paths, for Met they complement each other perfectly. “They really go hand in hand,” he says. “Honestly, I’ve learned so much about how to do effective advocacy from building our music career.”
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AJR — composed of the three Met brothers, Adam, Jack and Ryan — released Living Room, their first album, in 2015. The eclectic indie pop trio, who began their musical career as street performers in New York City, have since had such Billboard Hot 100 chart hits as “Weak,” “World’s Smallest Violin,” “Burn the House Down” and “Bang!” From the start, they have fostered a close relationship with their fans and have used their reach to inspire activism.
Five years ago, Met founded the nonprofit Planet Reimagined, which trains future climate leaders and teaches them how to combine thought and advocacy to fight the climate crisis and deliver real solutions. Planet Reimagined recently completed Amplify, a landmark study in conjunction with Ticketmaster, which polled Ticketmaster customers and venues across the country to understand the issues they cared about and how they want to help change the world.
“This specific study was to really understand how we can measure something called collective effervescence,” Met tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s a term that was coined by [Émile] Durkheim, the sociologist, and it’s really that moment when you’re in a concert, or at a sports event, and that feeling of everyone being on the same page, that energy of everyone being of one mind, and how we can use that to create action and advocacy.”
The study found that people want to take action, and most importantly they want to do it collectively. “The study found that they want to take action where they can see the impact that they’re going to have. They want to work with the kinds of organizations that have already shown some impact,” Met says. “And when they hear the artists talk about this or the celebrities talk about this, the language really has to be, ‘I want you to join me in taking action.’ As opposed to, ‘Please do this.’”
AJR is implementing results of the study on the second leg of the band’s “The Maybe Man Tour” this summer. Not only will $1 of every ticket sold go to Planet Reimagined, concertgoers will also be given an actionable item to promote climate sustainability. “On-site in every single place, we are focusing on a local issue,” Met says, “because every single city has either a petition that needs to be signed, or something that’s being voted on in a local legislature, or there’s an election coming up, and we’re going to allow them to take action on-site.”
These hyper-local issues are a way to hopefully let people experience positive results of their advocacy. “In some cities, it might be electrifying the school bus fleet. In some cities, it might be increased bike lanes,” Met says. “In some cities, it might be the renewable electrification of the grid. It’s going to be very specific. They’ll literally pick up the phone while they’re walking into the venue, read this script [and] leave a message for their representative.”
Met notes that many of his music industry cohorts are excited to implement this strategy on their tours. Planet Reimagined is currently creating a digital tool kit, so other artists can plug in their information, the demographics of their fans, and cities they are performing in, and they will receive an advocacy strategy to follow. For artists long constrained by politics, the Amplify study offers hope that a new day is dawning. “The era of ‘shut up and sing’ is over,” Met says. “Fans really want these artists to actually talk about these issues.”
This story first appeared in the June 2024 Sustainability issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to see the rest of the issue.
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