AJR’s Adam Met at Madison Square Garden in New York City, July 2024. Greg Allen/Invision/AP
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Imagine if every climate policy rollback was met with the same unshakable loyalty Swifties show when Taylor drops a breakup song. What if climate action had the same unstoppable energy as Beyoncé’s BeyHive, marching full speed ahead toward a green economy?
According to Adam Met, the climate movement could learn a thing or two from fan-building tactics deployed by today’s pop stars. After all, he is one.
Met, 35, is the bassist of the multi-platinum indie-rock band AJR, which he started with his two brothers in 2005. Thirteen years later, after the band began selling out stadiums and amphitheaters, Met founded a climate focused nonprofit organization called Planet Reimagined—a climate research, advocacy, and storytelling hub—with his colleague Mila Rosenthal.
From plastic-free concessions to farm-to-stage initiatives, many musicians have worked hard to shrink the environmental footprint of their national tours. But for Met, carbon-neutral concerts and low-impact festivals are just the opening act. He sees bigger potential for the music industry: serving as a climate movement incubator.
Met is now juggling his work as an activist, author, musician, and adjunct professor at Columbia University. In June, he released his first book, Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World, which shows how fan-building strategies can be applied to social movements.
Between his book tour and AJR’s music tour, “Somewhere in the Sky,” Met sat down with Inside Climate News for an interview to discuss the connections between climate, music, and fan building.
When and why did you become interested in climate activism?
When I was in high school, I took a class on human rights, and we went on a class trip to see Mary Robinson speak. For me, it just took that one moment of hearing her speak about the connections between climate change and human rights that set me on this path. Since then, she and I have become friendly.
Then, over time, I started to see the impact of climate change firsthand on my work as a musician and on the fans who came to our shows. We would pull into San Francisco, and we would literally have to wear gas masks from the tour bus into the venue because the smoke from wildfires was so bad. When we pulled into Athens, Greece, the entire city flooded in minutes, and we had to drive through the floods to make it to the venue.
But we would experience these climate impacts and then move onto the next city in our tour, while our fans had to stay and clean up the mess. Seeing climate change directly, and studying it so deeply in undergrad and for my PhD, made me realize that this is the thing I need to dedicate my life to.
You recently came out with your first book that explores the connections between fan building and movement building. Can you tell me more about what those connections are?
Over the past 20 years AJR has built a fanbase, a unique fanbase. What I realized was that the same strategies we used to build our fanbase—and the strategies that a lot of other artists use—are all really relevant for how to build communities that can do good in the world.
Almost every day when I am on tour, I get asked by fans: What can I do? How can I help? The book answers those questions. It gives people creative, out-of-the-box ideas to build collective action. At the same time, the book gives people who have spent years working in this space fresh and different ideas. Ideas that work really well in music and entertainment, and how they can be applied to the climate space.
What are some of those fan-building ideas that can be applied to the climate movement?
Traditionally, the model of building a fan base and a social movement can be seen through the metaphor of a ladder. When you’re on the first rung of the ladder, that may mean you have heard a song or heard of a social movement. You go up a rung, and maybe you follow the band on social media or an organization connected to a social movement. Then you go up another rung; maybe you attend the band’s show or attend an organizing meeting. And you keep going up and up the ladder.
“People are much more likely to take action…if they have the opportunity to do it in person.”
This model doesn’t work in 2025, because it implies that this work is done as an individual. The actual model that I believe works looks more like a hurricane. At the beginning, you need to bring fans and followers really close to you, towards the center of the movement. Give them all the tools and skills they need to go out in the world to bring other people into the movement. Then those new people come close to the center, where we can again give them the skills and knowledge they need. By bringing them close to the center, they become really dedicated. They become evangelizers of the movement.
You can bring them to the center through gamification, building a bigger tent, effective storytelling, or featuring—where, just like bands, social movements can collaborate with each other. There are a lot of really effective fan-building methods that use the model of the hurricane rather than the ladder.
How does this understanding shape AJR’s practices as both a band and an advocacy group?
On our tours we try to limit our emissions as much as possible. We green the backstage areas by eliminating single-use plastics, donating extra food when possible, making sure energy from the show is coming from renewables, and whatever else we can do.
And that’s great, but at the same time we built in an advocacy strategy to our tours itself. At every stop on our last tour there was an opportunity for fans to take political or civil action on site. There were booths set up to call their representatives, flyers about volunteering at local nonprofits, or tables to sign petitions. And every action was hyperlocalized. In each city the actions are customized to the things impacting or relating to their local communities.
On our last tour we had 35,000 people take some sort of climate action.
What is the current state of the climate movement within the music industry? Are other artists speaking out?
Well, right now the climate movement seems to be a mess. It is leaderless and rudderless. The climate movement has a communications problem and is too large and existential of an issue to discuss easily. So how are you supposed to write a song that includes climate?
The way we are seeing the climate movement manifest itself into the music industry is not through the art itself, but through online advocacy and tours. Touring is not only the biggest emitter within the industry but is the place where you bring people together in person. All our research at Planet Reimagined shows that people are much more likely to take action—and see the impact of their action—if they have the opportunity to do it in person.
The best climate advocacy shows their fans the impact of climate locally and gives them an opportunity to engage in action. And by action, I do not mean switching the type of straws they’re using or taking shorter showers. By action, I mean civil and political participation.
For example, Billie Eilish did a great job implementing climate advocacy into her United Kingdom tour, and Planet Reimagined helped install those advocacy tactics into her tour. Artists like Jack Johnson and Dave Mathews are doing a great job as well.
What advice would you give to other artists who may want to speak out about climate change but are hesitant to?
Planet Reimagined just did a big study with Ticketmaster to figure out from fans what they want to hear from their favorite artists. And we found that fans want artists to speak about the issues they care about. If it’s manufactured or inauthentic, then don’t talk about it. Climate change is not an issue artists should pretend to care about. But if the artist actually does care about climate change and is talking about it online, then have real-world opportunities for fans to participate at your shows.
Planet Reimagined, AJR and Inside Climate News all focus a lot on storytelling. What is the importance of storytelling within the climate movement?
Stories are the only way to drive meaningful change. A lot of articles about climate change that are filled with statistics are so dry that they turn people away—1.5°C means nothing to anyone other than scientists. Plus it is Celsius, so it really means nothing to Americans. Good stories are a way for people to feel something and connect issues to their real life.
When we are building a show or tour for the band, it’s all about how we can get people to be happy, sad, angry, frustrated, and hopeful, because feeling all these emotions will connect them to the band. It’s the same thing with climate storytelling. We need to get people to have an emotional connection to climate issues, because that drives them to be a part of the movement.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
