Billie Eilish Bemoans Wastefulness Of “Your Favorite Artists” Releasing Dozens Of Vinyl Variants
Over the years, Billie Eilish has taken initiative to advocate for sustainability. In 2019, she teamed up with Global Citizen to offer free concert tickets to environmental conscious fans. In 2022, the pop star launched a climate action event called Overheated. She opened up about the issue in a new Billboard interview, in which she called out artists who are “wasteful” by releasing dozens of vinyl variants.
Her latest album, 2021’s Happier Than Ever, came in eight vinyl variants, but was made of 100% recycled black vinyl and shrink-wrap made from sugar cane, as well as recycled scraps for colored variants. Eilish explains, “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 and gets them more…”
She continued:
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, and I find it really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable and do the best that I can and try to involve everybody in my team in being sustainable — and 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. 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.
Read the full interview here.
UPDATE: Eilish posted a follow-up on Instagram. “I wasn’t singling anyone out, these are industry-wide system issues,” she wrote.