Coldplay tour app helps fans plan green travel

Coldplay have launched a free app for fans as part of their pledge to make their ongoing Music of the Spheres world tour as eco-friendly as possible.

Since the Tyndall Centre’s 2021 Super-Low Carbon Live Music Report concluded that fan travel accounts for the largest part of tour-related emissions, the app allows fans to plan low-carbon travel to and from shows, with those who choose green journeys rewarded with a merchandise discount code.

The app – made in partnership with SAP – is available to download now for iOS and Android devices, and will also measure total fan-travel carbon emissions so that the band can “drawdown these impacts via high quality nature-based solutions such as reforestation and soil regeneration”.

Alongside the fan-travel calculator, the app also offers Coldplay-themed games and AR experiences, exclusive behind-the-scenes content, photos and videos from every show, plus news updates and tour information. The band will also stream the full audio of an upcoming date exclusively via the app.

“They’re not just talking about doing something, they’re leading by example”

The Music of the Spheres tour, which kicked off in Costa Rica in March, heads to North America this week before touching down in Europe in July.

Having previously put touring plans on hold to investigate how to make their concerts more sustainable, the announcement of Coldplay’s 2022 tour came hand-in-hand with a 12-point plan for cutting their carbon footprint.

“They’re not just talking about doing something, they’re leading by example,” the band’s agent Josh Javor of X-ray Touring told IQ last year. “I think you do need bigger artists to show other people how it could be possible to change.

“I was involved in the parts I could be, like figuring out how we can try and cut the carbon footprint by staying in the same place and playing more shows. It’s very different from the standard tour where artists do one or two shows and then move on in order to visit as many places as possible.”

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