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Billie Eilish is calling out artists who are not mindful of the environmental impact they are having by selling multiple vinyl variants to boost their album sales.
The Oscar winner has been conscious about using 100% recycled black vinyl for copies of her Happier Than Ever album, using recycled scraps for colored variants, and having each record enclosed in a shrink-wrap made of sugarcane.
“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…,” Eilish said in an interview with Billboard about sustainability.
Eilish’s mother, Maggie Baird, added, “Well, it counts toward No. 1 albums.”
The “Bad Guy” creator 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 f***ing 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 sh**,” she added.
Baird suggested that Billboard limit the number of variants an album can have as a solution to this problem.
“I was watching The Hunger Games and it made me think about it, because it’s like, we’re all going to do it because [it’s] the only way to play the game. It’s just accentuating this already kind of messed up way of this industry working,” Eilish said.
