MSUS Culminating Experience Executive Summary

Sustainable Sound: Festival Guide
11/19/2019
Matthew Burmeister
Across the world, music festivals draw in millions of fans and generate billions in revenue.
Although the festival scene is trendy, stakeholders are beginning to evaluate its
negative impacts. When improperly managed, festivals damage natural systems, lose
opportunities to support and engage with their fans, exclude local businesses, and
ignore ethical supply chains.
To satisfy the increased market demand for sustainable music festivals and to better
align their operations with their organization's values, festival organizers seek ways to
improve their events. However, multiple barriers, such as financial restrictions,
knowledge gaps, and lack of attendee engagement, prevent them from doing so.
Sustainable Sound: Festival Guide has been created in partnership with M3F Fest, The
Cosanti Foundation, and ASU's Campus Student Sustainability Initiatives (CSSI) to
overcome the barriers and plan resource positive music festivals.
Sustainable Sound is based on The Mair and Jago Green Event Framework. The Mair
and Jago framework was selected because it uses a systemic approach that is
straightforward, thorough, and easy to follow. However, to compensate for its lack of
specifics on operation changes and attendee engagement strategies: existing green
event guides, market-based research, academic articles, interviews with subject matter
experts, festival case studies, festival site visits, and firsthand experience working with
M3F Fest was used in the creation of the guide. Researching existing guides and worldleading sustainable festivals helped to establish a benchmark for the success of this

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project. For the guidebook to be successful, it must adequately address all of the
relevant festival components in a way that satisfies the project partners.
In an attempt to achieve this goal, Sustainable Sound is composed of five specific
sections. Part I: Planning for Sustainability provides strategies to create a sustainability
vision. Methods to reduce the impacts of audience travel, energy, waste, water,
production, and food and drinks comprise Part II: Operation Changes. Part III: Attendee
Engagement, includes lessons about gamification, workshops, design, and harm
prevention. Details concerning marketing, annual reporting, and data collection exist
in Part IV: Information Sharing. Lastly, Part V: Collaboration expresses the importance of
connecting with: municipalities, underserved communities, green festival organizations,
other festivals, and schools.
To assess client satisfaction, all project partners completed a questionnaire reviewing
the first draft of the guidebook. The results of the questionnaire were mostly positive. The
combined average score given to all of the sections of Sustainable Sound by all three
partners was 4.96 out of 5. While all of the partners were content with the guide, they
did provide suggestions on how it could be improved. Several of these suggestions
were incorporated in the final version of the guidebook, such as including additional
resources and the author's contact information. However, there was also feedback that
was not included in the guide due to time constraints. One suggestion, adding a
section about land preservation and history, was not addressed. While this topic is not
covered in the first iteration of Sustainable Sound, it inspires future edits or potential
follow-up projects for others.
Based upon the client feedback, Sustainable Sound: Festival Guide is a comprehensive
guide, capable of advancing the sustainable music festival industry. The three project
partners will utilize it when planning their events. Additionally, it is available as a free
download on in the School of Sustainability’s Graduate Culminating Experience
Repository. Looking to the future, Sustainable Sound has the potential to be
implemented by other festival organizations and to be reviewed and improved by
forthcoming students.

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