If you buy and play vinyl records, you know there is a difference in the sound between them and digital music. The sound is fuller and every instrument is clearer. But vinyl can also be difficult on the environment and Billie Eilish has an issue with musical artists who seem to want to create so many different variations on vinyl that the format becomes wasteful.
In other words, Eilish had to partly be thinking of Taylor Swift during a recent interview with Billboard when Eilish aired her grievances about creating so many records when the simple playing to the disc is the important part. Swift, of course, not only creates different variations of her latest records on vinyl (there will be four such variations for her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, due out on April 19), but she is also one of the main artists who revisit past work and create new albums.
Eilish also makes different variations of discs for records, but she also makes a point of having the vinyl made with recyclable materials. Even the packaging on the records is supposed to be made from eco-friendly material. Other artists, including Swift, seem to want to have less control over how their records are produced and more about how much they sell.
Billie Eilish seems to not like how Taylor Swift does business
According to Eilish, "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*****g 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 s**t."
There was no direct mention of Swift, of course, but as Swift is the biggest-selling musical artist in the world and has a proclivity for producing mass amounts of vinyl, one could safely assume that Eilish would include Swift as a subject of her outrage. To be fair, Eilish does not just speak about her wishes for a better environment, she works to improve things as well. This includes helping launch and fund REVERB's Music Decarbonization Project whose mission statement in part says the project "advances innovative climate solutions to directly eliminate carbon emissions created by the music industry."
Of course, none of what Eilish spoke about will have much impact on people buying Taylor Swift's new album. But maybe streaming the work would be better. Or maybe just buying just one edition of the vinyl.