Until now, when artists toured, they took their show to several cities. The new fashion for superstars is residencies, as it is called doing many concerts in a row in the same place, as Shakira just did in Madrid, the same thing that Bad Bunny did a few months ago, although the Puerto Rican also took his show to Barcelona and other European cities. This implies that, instead of the singer, his band and his team moving, the hundreds of thousands of attendees have to move - although tours also generate travel. The former involves transporting trucks and scenery, while the latter involves many plane trips. What is more sustainable?
It is a complex debate, to begin with, because there is not enough data on the origin of the attendees at these gigantic macro-concerts. It is evident that, if an artist only performs in one city, it must be his fans who move to see him, while if he tours several cities, there will be more people who catch him nearby. In April and May, Bad Bunny spent 10 days at the Metropolitano, where it attracted some 640,000 spectators, while promoters' estimates indicated that 60% came from outside Madrid (both from Spain and abroad).
Shakira, who this Monday gives her last concert in the capital, has been able to exceed 700,000 in 13 dates. The production company Live Nation does not offer figures on where the tickets have been sold, but the Viagogo platform, which sells resale tickets for these concerts, indicates that 51.4% of the tickets have been purchased in Spain (without specifying the city), and the rest in 117 countries: the United States, 9%; Germany, 5.1%; United Kingdom, 4.8%; France, 2.8%... And even Ukraine, Colombia or Mexico (all above 1%).
“Distributing concerts between different cities can be considerably more sustainable than concentrating them in one, even when this involves transporting stages, technical equipment and artists,” says Eduardo Viéitez, CEO of Creast, a software to calculate and reduce the environmental impact of events. And he continues: "With the data from Viagogo, it would be interesting to schedule a concert in Germany, another in the United Kingdom, another in France... until covering the cities from which the spectators travel. If the solution were to distribute the concerts between Madrid, Barcelona and Seville, it would probably not reduce the more carbon-intensive trips of attendees from abroad, mitigating only part of the national trips." Furthermore, EL PAÍS has confirmed that many fans of the Colombian artist have traveled thousands of kilometers to see her.
Paco Segura, from Ecologistas en Acción, criticizes the model: “This scheme of setting up residencies is much more profitable for the artist than for the fans, who have to travel if they want to see it.” In his opinion, "the problem is that many weekend flights are generated, which entail large emissions. People have a dissociation with air travel: environmentally conscious people do not see the contradiction in traveling many kilometers by plane to go to a concert, when aviation is one of the most difficult sectors to decarbonize. It is much more reasonable for the tour to travel through several cities."
Cristina Arjona, Greenpeace mobility expert, agrees: "By moving to this model, the environmental costs are transferred from the singer to the attendees. The artist can rest more, travel less and make more profits. The music industry wins, they set up the stage only once and argue that the travel of the trailers is less, but they do not take into account that the emissions are externalized on the flights of those who attend the concert."
On the other hand, Alejandra Gimeno, Climate and Sustainability technician at Ecodes, has doubts: "Neither of the two models has an inherent advantage. It cannot be categorically stated that a residency is better or worse than a tour. We need to know how much the public moves, how much production moves and what infrastructure can be resolved locally in each case." For the expert, “emissions depend on many factors and on conventional tours there is also movement of people, although it is true that when the artist moves there will be more people who travel fewer kilometers.”
The case of Adele in Munich
Residencies are not something new, although they are intensifying. In 2023, Coldplay chose to give four concerts in Barcelona and gave it a patina of sustainability. The following year, the English singer Adele – who has confessed that she does not like flying – gave 10 concerts in the German city of Munich in which she brought together some 750,000 people. The German Julian Vogels, co-founder of a social company to reduce carbon emissions in large events - Crowd Impact - then set out to analyze the sustainability of these events. The expert asked 1,400 attendees to find out the origin of the audience and then made environmental calculations, with which he estimated that it was “a superlative event, also in terms of emissions.”
"Large touring productions transport their technical equipment, stage set-up, production... between 20 and 50 trucks. Let's round up to 60 trucks. If each one transports 20 tons, and the emission factor per ton every 100 kilometers is 0.075 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e), and they travel a distance of 1,000 kilometers for each stop on the tour, that would be equivalent to 900 tons of CO₂e”, he explains by email.
And he continues: "If Bad Bunny or Shakira's concerts have as catastrophic an impact as Adele's, it can be estimated at least 650,000 times in which each attendee generates about 140 kilos of CO₂e, which would amount to 9,100 tons of CO₂e. That is ten times more than the transportation logistics. Of course, this is only a rough calculation; it gives an idea." Other studies carried out in Germany indicate that the carbon footprint of this type of concerts varies from 40% to 90% of the total generated by these events.
Beyond these aspects, macro events generate a lot of waste. "Massive public events are identified as one of the main critical points of consumption and waste of single-use products. They generate large volumes of disposable glasses, plates, cutlery and food containers," criticizes Julio Barea, waste expert at Greenpeace. For this reason, they ask to ban disposable products and force them to be returned, as well as to provide free water fountains to avoid water bottles.
