The Pop Corporation

We live in weird times, but sometimes, peculiar things happen and you have to embrace them. With artificiality becoming an increasing concern with the advent of AI and whatnot, what of nature itself? Well, someone’s had a bright idea to get nature its royalties. No, seriously.

Many musicians include the sounds of nature in their music, from New Age mood makers, to The Beatles in ‘Blackbird’, and more besides. Nature has provided an enriching backdrop for many a great song, from babbling brooks, to sky shattering storms, to soaring eagles and the gentle swaying of trees.

There’s a new initiative which is going to see nature credited as a co-conspirator and this will come into play on all your favourite streaming services. Streams, both literal and figurative there.

So how does this work? Well, if you’re a musician who has included any sound from nature in a song of yours, they can now credit ‘nature’ as a featured artist and a share of those profits will go toward environmental causes. That’s a neat idea isn’t it? And this is the brainchild of the godfather of ambient, Brian Eno.

“It’s a way of saying to artists, ‘We all use sounds like seagulls and waves and wind. Why don’t we pay nature a royalty?’” says Brian Eno. “Hopefully it’ll be a river, or a torrent, or a flood of royalties – and then what we do is distribute that among groups of people who are working on projects to help us deal with the future.”

It’s part of the Get Real project, and a number of artists are spearheading the campaign, including Ellie Goulding, London Grammer and others.

“It’s such a thrill working with non-musical sources,” continued Eno. “Most of the instruments we work with are designed to behave themselves… natural sounds are sort of raw, they’re wild elements. You have to make a decision about whether you are going to make them sound more like instruments, or whether you’re going to pull the music towards those things. And I think the second option is, actually, kind of more interesting.”

Prompted by the UN with a project called Sounds Right, it’s hoped that this whole thing could raise somewhere in the region of $40m in the first few years.