CCB Magazine

Horst Weidenmüller: "We are serious about this"

Photo: © Jorinde Gersina

The music industry has been striving for more sustainability for some time now. But how does one switch to sustainability as a label? Berlin-based music company !K7 is the first of its kind to pursue a "Net Zero Strategy" and has presented a comprehensive transparency report on its carbon footprint. What's it all about? A visit to the place of action in Berlin's Wedding.
 

Text Jens Thomas       and Josephine Lass

Entering the colonnaded entrance through the venerable-looking garden with fountain and rose bushes, it wouldn't occur to you that a few decades ago skulls and bones lay here beneath the now manicured English lawn. Surrounded by a high stone wall and newer buildings, just off the Wedding S-Bahn station, the site is a former crematorium. In its day, at the opening 1912, it was the first crematorium in Berlin. Today, it's home to silent green - an event and cultural venue. Popular indie bands such as Andy Shauf and Weval have played here to sold-out audiences, and the site is a new home for around 100 creative people, including institutions such as the Musicboard Berlin and the company !K7.

We have an appointment with Horst Weidenmüller, the boss of !K7. !K7 is a Berlin flagship label. Founded in 1985 and having gone through all of Berlin's ups and downs as well as all of the music industry's crises, it is now the first music company with a Net Zero strategy, which means that they have a clear sustainability strategy to save CO2. Weidenmüller is 59 years old. He has shoulder-length brown hair and gold-framed aviator-style glasses. His hair keeps falling in his face as he speaks. Weidenmüller looks refreshed, as if he's just come from a vacation. In airy clothes, he sits with us in an anteroom of his office in a side wing of the main building, where 42 !K7 employees find place.

It all started with indie acts like Einstürzende Neubauten or Nick Cave. Today, the label !K7 focuses on the international market and has offices in London and New York in addition to its founding location in Berlin

Weidenmüller begins to talk about the old Berlin, about new challenges, the music industry with outdated concepts and innovations that are needed. Back then, 42 years ago, he says, he came to Berlin as a 17-year-old and first lived in one of the squats on Bülowstraße. Berlin was the city of conscientious objectors; the nights were always long in Kreuzberg, and when the lights went out, it was morning again. No one thought about ecology back then, not even he, despite the alarming report of the Club of Rome in 1972 and the Brundtland Report in 1987, which already showed that the future of the planet was in danger. At !K7, everything revolved around music. Initially, the company was not a classical label, but rather a television production company for indie acts such as Einstürzende Neubauten or Nick Cave. Weidenmüller quickly recognized the problem at the time of obtaining the appropriate music rights for the recordings. That's why he recorded punk concerts with a film camera, archiving them. Later, he produced the first computer-animated techno videos, which ran high and low on MTV. "That was our first source of money," says the !K7 boss. And from the beginning, he says, they focused on the international market. That's still the case today, he says. In addition to Berlin, !K7 has offices in London and New York.

Top: The silent green cultural quarter at night, photo © Cordia Schlegelmilch. Bottom: The urn hall and urn grove in 1914. photo © silent green.

Weidenmüller leads us through the company, which has two floors, several rooms for the employees, and a kitchen. Everything looks neat, almost sterile, only two punks on a large picture remind us of the old days. !K7 has become a small empire. The label group comprises six in-house labels - including the award-winning Strut Records. 63 label partners are affiliated, and 27 different distributors are spread around the globe. The main work at !K7 is to sign artists and organize the distribution of the sub-labels. Over the years, numerous acts have emerged from !K7 - including electronic formations such as Kruder & Dorfmeister, Peggy Gou or the dystopian Einstürzende Neubauten. And in addition to many electronic bands that initially laid the foundation for the label, the repertoire now also includes dub bands like New Zealand's Fat Freddy's Drop or the indie dance group Whitest Boy Alive.

We arrive at the executive office on the second floor, Weidenmüller offers us a seat, and we quickly get to know each other. He says that sustainability has been an established principle for him since 2018. Half of his company now deals with this topic. He himself is also the founder and chairman of the IMPALA Sustainability Task Force, which networks indie labels and musicians worldwide and develops sustainability programs for players in the business. Through the IMPALA Group's Sustainability Task Force, a sustainability action guide for labels was created, and a C02 calculator was also created, which 6,000 members in Europe alone have access to. In addition, !K7 was the first and so far the only label to present a comprehensive transparency report on its carbon footprint - it wants to cut emissions by up to 40 percent, and by 2030 it wants to be climate positive, which means not only creating a balance between carbon emissions and the absorption of carbon from the atmosphere (climate neutral), but also reducing the proportion of greenhouse gases. They have also implemented a virtual carbon tax, through which 45 euros per ton of emissions distributed are invested in projects that reduce CO2 - including renaturation projects such as Moorfutures or Nicaforest.

Left to right.: Label boss Horst Weidenmüller and sustainability manager Karl Kobs. Photo: © CCB Magazine

The !K7 office, first aid guaranteed. Photo: © CCB Magazine

Photo: © CCB Magazine

But how do you convert to sustainability as a label? What are the biggest items, where are the problems? Karl Kobs, who is responsible for sustainability at !K7 along with 19 other employees, joins the group. The mid-30-year-old wears white linen pants and Birkenstocks; he was hired specifically to focus on manufacturing and distribution. "85 percent of our emissions are attributable to production and distribution," emphasizes the sustainability manager. And for that, he says, you ultimately have to rely on the press plants. "But they are the problem," Weidenmüller adds. The press plants don't want transparency; they're afraid that emissions could be considered a new criterion, which would end up costing more money.

Saving costs and conserving resources is one of the central issues in the music industry. While concerts and tours generate the most CO2 emissions in the area of mobility, the biggest items for a label are production and distribution

In contrast to the rest of the music industry, where mobility and streaming are the main sources of CO2 emissions - up to 90 percent of emissions at concerts come from the items of travel and mobility - for a label it's distribution: "CDs or vinyl can be sold via cardboard slaves, which are recyclable," says Kobs. But vinyl production quickly reaches its limits, because vinyl is still made with polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which means enormous energy consumption and devours crude oil as a raw material. On top of that, there is music streaming, over which one has no influence anyway. Researchers at the Universities of Glasgow and Oslo have calculated that the US music industry is producing less plastic waste thanks to streaming. But greenhouse gas emissions have increased. According to calculations by Sharon George of Keele University in Newcastle, the U.S. music industry consumed 45 percent more CO2 in 2016 compared to 1977, which adds up to more than 200,000 tons. To counter this, !K7 does its homework in-house first: 22 percent of CDs and vinyls are now shipped by ship, which not only saves 80 percent of emissions. It also reduces costs by up to 60 percent. In addition, the company is making a holistic switch to sustainability - from water consumption in toilets and faucets to replacing all light bulbs with LEDs. Green electricity is purchased anyway, and flying is avoided as far as possible.

In general, cutting costs and conserving resources is one of the central themes in the music industry. In the 2000s, it was file sharing that brought the music industry to its knees via free downloading, but today it's the streaming providers that are gobbling up resources, while artists hardly earn anything from the streaming revenues. Weidenmüller is keen to make deals with his acts as fair as possible. "If someone comes and tells me he's the next hot shit and convinces me, he'll gladly get up to 90 percent." Others get 20 percent, and the distribution ultimately depends on how high the risk is, because the main task of a label is to take responsibility for new artists, which hardly anyone would do without the corresponding investments. And for Weidenmüller, assuming responsibility means ecological and social responsibility at the same time - this includes not only renaturation projects that are financed through the company's income. It also includes fair employee management and pay, he says, which is why the company also wants to become a B Corp next year, which is a type of certification for companies that take into account factors such as fair employee management and pay and raise funds for charitable causes. "We're really serious about this." 

It's getting late, a thunderstorm is coming up. We're clearing our place and the !K7 boss himself brings us outside the door. Here in the forecourt of the old chapel, where the last sacrament used to be administered, a new zeitgeist is beating today. For Weidenmüller and his team, this means getting up for new times. Whereas in the past it was the destructiveness of Einstürzende Neubauten that defied the mainstream in subversive Berlin, today it's an upright walk for more sustainability that reaches into the mainstream. Just recently, for example, the big three music giants Sony, Warner and Universal, along with others like Warp and Ninja Tune, signed the Music Climate Pact, with the goal of halving their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and reducing them to net zero by 2050. For Weidenmüller, these are good signs. "We want to bring our sustainability strategy into the mainstream," the label boss makes clear. Weidenmüller stands in the yard and adjusts his glasses one last time. He looks confidently at the pillar entrance. "We need imitators now," he makes clear. It wouldn't be the first time he succeeded in making the next leap.

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