New Eco-App Declares U2 Bad for the Planet

(Sept. 7) -- Justin Bieber's place in the musical canon may be a matter of debate, but from an environmental standpoint, at least, he's on the side of the angels.

Bieber is one of a number of artists -- along with Jay-Z, Lady Gaga and the Georgia indie-pop band Of Montreal -- to be designated an "Earth Saver" by a new app that measures a touring act's carbon footprint.

The app, Earth Destroyers, calculates how many pounds of carbon dioxide an artist produces by touring. Using data from the tracking site Bandsintown, artists are classified as either good or bad for the planet depending on how far they travel between shows in a given window of time.

Sometimes the results can be surprising -- like when U2, whose front man Bono is well known for his philanthropic and humanitarian work, turns out to be an "Earth Destroyer" at 3,707 pounds of CO2 per show.

The app is the brainchild of Paul Lamere, a director of developers for the Massachusetts music-software company The Echo Nest. Lamere created Earth Destroyers during the most recent Music Hack Day, an event held every couple of months where developers try to create new pieces of music-organization technology in a single weekend.

Reached for comment, Lamere cautioned that the methodology Earth Destroyers uses means its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. Specifically, he said, "I would not put a whole lot of stock into that CO2 per show [number] being accurate."

The figure, Lamere explained to Surge Desk, was calculated based on an estimate of how much carbon dioxide a band would produce by flying to every stop on its tour. But a lot of artists travel by bus, and in their cases the numbers won't reflect reality very closely.

Still, Lamere said, the app is useful for getting a general sense of how artists compare to each other.

The worst offenders, he points out, are those bands or artists who do a lot of flying between continents, or back and forth between the East and West coasts.

These Earth Destroyers include Metallica, Snoop Dogg and country crooner Taylor Swift.

Earth Destroyers isn't Lamere's first contribution to a Music Hack Day. In May, for a Hack Day held in San Francisco, he created 6 Degrees to Black Sabbath, which links musical artists in a web of collaboration and cover performances, Kevin Bacon-style.

Not for nothing, but using the 6 Degrees app, you can get from Metallica to Snoop Dogg in a mere four steps, and from there it's just another four to Taylor Swift.

Maybe the global warming conspiracists are onto something.