Tag: Climate Action

This Earth Day, Spotify Lifts the Voices Fighting Climate Change

April 20, 2023

Climate change is a problem that impacts individuals, communities, and the planet we call home. Real solutions to help the planet exist, but it’s going to take all of us working together. 

To mark this year’s global celebration of Earth Day, we’re using our platform and reach to raise awareness and inspire climate action. Through creative approaches like songwriters camps and true crime podcasts, we’re using the power of audio to lift the voices working to protect the planet.

Informing and enabling fans through content

This Earth Day, listeners can learn from creators and get inspired to promote positive change through our Climate Action Hub, which is available globally. In addition to discovering climate-focused podcasts, audiobooks, and playlists curated by leading voices, listeners can easily click through to the UN Act Now website to take action. 

Empowering artists, producers, and songwriters

In partnership with EarthPercent, Spotify hosted “The Earth as Your Co-Writer,” a two-day songwriters camp held at the Spotify Studios in LA on April 17 and 18. As part of the effort to support climate action, participating artists RINI, UMI, Jenevieve, Zacari, Joony, and Presley elected to credit Earth as a co-writer on their songs, making the planet a stakeholder in any music released from the camp. Proceeds will go to selected EarthPercent organizations. We asked some of the participating artists to tell us more about the earth’s impact on their work. 

This Earth Day, Spotify Is Handing the Mic to Young Climate Activists

April 22, 2022

The climate crisis is one of the most pressing issues of our era. Anytime we speak about addressing climate change we know that we must center the people, places, and communities most affected, to learn from them and inspire us into action. So this year for Earth Day, Spotify is using the power and impact of our global platform to amplify the voices of next-generation climate activists fighting to dismantle global environmental injustices and find climate justice across social, economic, and policy changes. We’re handing them a microphone via our platform and redesigned Climate Action Hub to listen to their stories of climate change and its impact on daily life, as well as share actionable ways for listeners to get involved. (The Climate Action Hub is available here via a mobile device or by searching “Climate Action” on Spotify.)

Youth Dispatches: Our Earth

The first place to stop is our new podcast playlist series, Youth Dispatches: Our Earth. This podcast playlist features three climate change activists who speak on the future of our planet and how we all can take action to create a better world. These global activists offer insight on what we can all do to enact change: from a personal level to a global one. You can also hear from Dr. Johanna Beckman at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Action Research, whose voice and recommendations are included in the hub playlists.

In “The Land is Medicine,” Seqininnguaq Lynge Poulsen, an Indigenous rights activist and artist in Greenland, delves into how climate change is impacting their Indigenous community and what it looks like to take care of oneself in the face of a shifting world. (Their podcast episode is available in English and Greenlandic). “The Earth Is Resilient” features Gabrielle, a climate educator in Athens, Georgia, talking about her optimism for climate justice. She takes us through ways we can positively contribute both big and small. In “From Knowledge to Action,” Luisa Neubauer, a youth climate justice activist and podcaster in Germany, discusses her journey to activism and how to transform knowledge of the climate crisis into action to prevent it. (Her episode is available in English and German.)

Also make sure to check out Gabrille’s second curated playlist, The OG Guide to Climate Change, as well as Seqininnguaq’s Decolonizing Climate Change. Each activist picked around five podcasts to highlight for listeners. The podcast playlist series was created in partnership with social impact agency Invisible Hand, with production support by Pod People.

Gary Niemen, Stephan Hofmann, and Their Hack Week Team Collaborate Toward Climate Footprint Calculator for Listeners

March 31, 2022

Earlier this month, more than 2,400 Spotify employees took part in our annual Hack Week. For five days, employees from across the business stepped away from their regular work and focused their energies on projects or initiatives they’re passionate about. And just as last year’s Hack Week encouraged Spotifiers to “make space,” this year’s also served as a larger call to action, challenging individuals to think critically about ways of better using our platform to “make the planet cooler.” What’s more, Hack Week 2022 encouraged a greater number of employees outside of engineering to hack than ever before.

Though Hack Week was again held virtually, employees came together on Slack, Google Meet, real-time note-taking, and our virtual Hack Week platform to push each other on ideas related to amplifying the company’s climate action, sustaining justice for people and the planet using our platform, helping Spotify reach net-zero emissions, and more. Each individual chose a project that personally excited them, though these are not projects that Spotify is currently pursuing—or that even relate back to each person’s work. This year, the For the Record team spoke to five hackers who worked across these themes on four climate-related projects. 

Product manager Gary Niemen

Product manager Gary Niemen is no stranger to Hack Week. In fact, his Spotify team was created thanks to a hack a few years back. And although he spent the last two Hack Weeks working solo on his own projects, this year was different. The theme inspired him to think on a much larger scale and embark on a collaboration that connected hackers within—and outside of—Spotify. 

He found a partner in Stephan Hofmann, a product manager on our Experience team and avid Hack Week participant. The pair welcomed everyone who wanted to join and assembled a huge team that spanned the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Sweden, Portugal, and India. They set to work on a project involving Spotify’s platform, an externally created carbon calculator, and the potential to merge the two.

Tell us about the hack you worked on.

Stephan: We partnered with a Swedish startup that built a carbon footprint calculator. You input how much you fly or what kind of food you tend to eat, or how you heat your home. And by answering all of these questions we can get a pretty good estimate of how many tons of carbon dioxide you use per year. We can also break those tons down into categories like where the emissions come from and get a pretty good model to understand your habits. And that’s really interesting information, because in order to change a habit, you have to understand it. And humans like to quantify things. So then, with Spotify quantifying it, we could personalize the content that we are showing to you. 

Gary: For example, if most of your emissions come from flying, we could show you podcasts on how you can offset your emissions from flying. We also thought it would be interesting to allow users to compare their carbon footprints with others—like with fellow heavy metal fans, for example, or with your favorite artist. That was another aspect to make it a bit fun; to help listeners fully engage. Essentially, once we enabled users to both calculate and understand their habits, we also wanted to help have a go at addressing their impact. 

Your hack would allow our users to take responsibility and action around their own impact on the climate. Why was that the approach you wanted to take with your hack? 

Stephan: We did a bit of thinking about the process of how someone makes a change, right? We all have responsibilities as individuals, but without a number to put to it, it can feel very ephemeral. If I drive my car, there are no immediate environmental consequences for that. But having the calculation really puts it into a quantitative perspective for people, which psychology shows is how you make a change to a habit. And because we’re actually giving them some ideas through the massive amount of content we have on our platform, we can actually give them advice and enable them to find out what they can do.

Gary: Quite early on in the week, I was looking at Spotify’s users and it’s above 400 million. I was thinking, okay, 400 million? And then the planet’s got 8 billion. So I thought, what percentage of the world population is that? That’s actually a pretty large percentage! This helped me to understand our potential impact.

Is there anything you’d like to bring from Hack Week back into your everyday work?

Product manager Stephan Hofmann

Stephan: I want to bring sustainability into my own product strategy more often. Because we’re both PMs, we have some influence. It’s given me a lot of inspiration on where we can go in our own product road maps. But I also think that a little bit of this “hack mentality,” trying something out before trying to define something completely, is a way to bring an agile methodology into a pure sprint, a chaotic sprint, that can really be beneficial. 

Gary: I spent the whole week thinking about messaging. First of all, getting the message over to the team—like a vision—to show what we’re doing. But then it starts to shift as everyone brings in their ideas. My job the whole week was keeping us aligned and focused and then removing blocks. So as the week went on, thinking “how can we communicate this to our stakeholders?” I’ll take away the importance of messaging and to always be refining. And even today, I suddenly understood even more of what we’re trying to do. 

Why is it important for Spotifiers to hack on making the planet cooler?

Gary: In our 2020 sustainability report, it says—and I can’t quote it exactly—but there’s a line there that basically says, we not only have a responsibility in terms of our emissions, but we also have a responsibility to use the impact that we the have on the global audience that we have, to make a difference. So that’s what sticks in the mind for me.

Stephan: This kind of stuff is what you think about maybe after work or when you’re, you know, having a shower or when you’re just living your daily life. And the problem is that our day jobs generally are very rigid around what is expected to be delivered. And it doesn’t leave the creative room to think, to actually build these kinds of game-changing ideas that actually do bring huge value to the world and to Spotify. Hack Week is our time to think. 

This year, the For the Record team spoke to five hackers who worked across four climate-related Hack Week projects. Check out each story from Meredith, Mauricio, and Serah.

Serah Njambi Kiburu and Her Hack Week Team Use Curiosity and Milestones To Connect Their Hack and Their Everyday Work

March 31, 2022

Earlier this month, more than 2,400 Spotify employees took part in our annual Hack Week. For five days, employees from across the business stepped away from their regular work and focused their energies on projects or initiatives they’re passionate about. And just as last year’s Hack Week encouraged Spotifiers to “make space,” this year’s also served as a larger call to action, challenging individuals to think critically about ways of better using our platform to “make the planet cooler.” What’s more, Hack Week 2022 encouraged a greater number of employees outside of engineering to hack than ever before.

Though Hack Week was again held virtually, employees came together on Slack, Google Meet, real-time note-taking, and our virtual Hack Week platform to push each other on ideas related to amplifying the company’s climate action, sustaining justice for people and the planet using our platform, helping Spotify reach net-zero emissions, and more. Each individual chose a project that personally excited them, though these are not projects that Spotify is currently pursuing—or that even relate back to each person’s work. This year, the For the Record team spoke to five hackers who worked across these themes on four climate-related projects. 

Senior Developer Advocate Serah Njambi Kiburu has only been working at Spotify for six months, but she already sees how Hack Week fits into Spotify’s larger culture—as well as her own work. For her, Hack Week offered a five-day opportunity to chase some of the facets of her role that she didn’t have bandwidth to cover in her normal day-to-day. 

“Curiosity is written into my role—I work with tech communities quite a bit—and I keep a long list of ‘what ifs’—things I need to investigate and understand, and people I need to chat with and collaborate with. That in itself was enough fodder for Hack Week.” 

Can you tell us a little bit about the hack you chose and why you decided to get involved with it?  

I sit on the Developer Experience team. We are responsible for developer.spotify.com, or “Spotify for Developers.” So we essentially make documentation and resources available to our developer community to use on a portal. Given our team is relatively new, we wanted to revamp the portal since it is about three years old. But we haven’t had time for that because we were hired recently and have had a lot of work to do. So Hack Week seemed like the perfect place to both respond to our community members’ wish lists, but also address some of the things that we saw weren’t working optimally. 

How did the theme of “making the planet cooler” play into choosing this project and into the way you approached?

The tech that our developer portal uses is over three years old and as a result has become a little inefficient. We wanted to make the most of this year’s Hack Week theme to improve the platform with climate in mind. We wanted to ensure that we use the resources available to us more efficiently, and make some energy savings in the process. 

In developer relations, there’s also a very big metric called “time to happy.” This metric looks at how long it takes for your stakeholders to go from the question they have, the issue they have, the idea they have, to feeling empowered to do their best work with the resources provided. So we also made sure to apply this metric to our work as we focused on making the planet cooler—we knew that in working towards energy efficiency, we could also cut down on people-related bottlenecks as well. 

Serah and her Hack Week team

How did Hack Week work for your team? 

Once we got the theme, our team had to decide what project to work on. After we brainstormed, we determined that there were other people and expertise we needed that we didn’t have within the team. So it was the perfect opportunity for our team to collaborate with other teams, and we reached out to them. Throughout the week, we each picked a task from a task list we had from day one. They were independent tasks, which was really helpful as there were no dependencies that could get some people stuck. 

We also determined that it would be best for us to decide which things were a “must do” and what things were a “nice to have” in our list of tasks so that we would be able to celebrate small wins as though they were each really big milestones. This kept encouraging us. We’d never worked together before in that way or in such a short amount of time, and we knew that could easily be stressful. So those milestones really helped us do so well, and we ended up working really well together. In the end, we didn’t get to the ultimate goal. But what this did is it’s given us enough to be able to make an “OKD,” a key deliverable against an objective, in Q2 to finish this work in over a longer period of time. So that was really cool. 

Why do you think that hacking on the topic of “making the planet cooler” is important for Spotify employees to think through and work on? 

As a company at the intersection of music, people, and tech, we are predisposed to think about the future and all possibilities it holds. This theme is great because it grounds us in its deeper meanings. There is only one Earth. And as we haven’t heard any music from outer space, this serves as a great reminder to preserve what we have!

This year, the For the Record team spoke to five hackers who worked across four climate-related Hack Week projects. Check out each story from Meredith, Mauricio, and Gary and Stephan. 

Spotify’s Next Step on Our Path to Net Zero Emissions

September 28, 2021

Technology is all about interlocking systems that work together efficiently, and we often think about iterating on these systems to make them better. Climate change is one of these interconnected issues—making it vitally important for companies to disrupt old systems when it comes to combating the effects of global warming. That’s why, in September 2021, Spotify joined the Exponential Roadmap Initiative and the UN Race to Zero, a first step on our more ambitious climate action journey. 

The Exponential Roadmap Initiative consists of a network of selected innovative companies, scientists, and NGOs that commit to exponentially reducing greenhouse gas emissions,  educating and inspiring others to do so though their platforms and businesses, and engaging with the wider community to push the climate action agenda forward. 

“Climate change is one of the most pressing global issues of our lifetime,” says Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer. “Spotify has a responsibility to combat the effects of climate change, which is why we’re aiming to reach net zero emissions within the next decade.” 

Over the next days, months, and years, we’ll look to disrupt our ways of working and curb our emissions over a variety of ways:

  • Making our workplaces better: We continue to redesign, remodel, and run our offices with an eye toward environmental efficiency, accessibility, and renewable solutions.
  • Stream green: A percentage of our emissions is generated by streaming, downloads, and device battery usage. We are measuring this impact and aim to generate lower energy consumption from different devices, while offsetting any remaining emissions.
  • Partnering with suppliers who share our goals: Our biggest source of emissions is the goods and services we purchase. We are focused on collaborating with like-minded suppliers to reduce emissions in this area.

“We are delighted that Spotify joins other front-runners in climate action within the Exponential Roadmap Initiative,” says Johan Falk, Head of Exponential Roadmap Initiative and lead author of the “Exponential Roadmap and the 1.5°C Business Playbook.” “Spotify has a unique reach and opportunity to inspire people around the globe to take climate action.”

We’re already on our way to create climate-conscious solutions and use our platform to spread awareness and amplify action. Our Sustainable Sonics provide a low-carbon alternative to other forms of advertising. Our curated podcast playlists and Climate Action hub provide important information on taking climate action for our listeners. And finally, check out the Life at Spotify website climate section for the latest actions and reports. 

But there’s so much more to be done, and we need to do it now. Joining the Exponential Roadmap Initiative demonstrates our commitment to taking action, and we look forward to collaborating with our partners, incorporating feedback, and sharing more updates on this crucial journey.

Looking to learn more about the Exponential Roadmap and greenhouse gas-reducing solutions? Stream “The Scientific Case for The Race to Zero with Johan Rockström” or “Nigel Topping Racing to Zero.”

 

Forward-Looking Statements

We would like to caution you that certain of the above statements represent “forward-looking statements” as defined in Section 27A of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The words “will,” “aim,” and similar words are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Examples of forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our net zero emissions target, the anticipated timing of achieving such target, and the actions we plan to take to curb emissions and push the climate action agenda forward. We intend such forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions for forward-looking statements contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and include this statement for purposes of complying with the safe harbor provisions. Such forward-looking statements involve significant risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from our historical experience and our present expectations or projections, including but not limited to the risks as set forth in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date hereof.