Scope 3 Emissions Categories Simplified: What Music, Media and Entertainment Businesses Need to Know

Scope 3 emissions are, for most businesses, the largest and most difficult part of their carbon footprint. They sit outside your direct operations and outside your energy bills. They live in your supply chain, your logistics, your vendors, your audience's travel to your events, and the end-of-life disposal of the products you put into the world.

The GHG Protocol, the framework that underpins most corporate emissions reporting, divides Scope 3 into 15 categories across two groups: upstream (activities that feed into your business) and downstream (activities that flow out from it). All 15 matter in theory. In practice, not all of them are equally relevant to every sector, and for businesses in music, media and entertainment, understanding which categories carry the most weight is the starting point for any serious emissions reduction programme.

This article sets out the categories that matter most, and why.

Why Scope 3 Is the Category That Cannot Be Ignored

Before getting into the breakdown, it is worth being clear about scale. For the vast majority of music, media and entertainment businesses, Scope 3 emissions dwarf Scope 1 (direct emissions from operations you own) and Scope 2 (emissions from purchased electricity). A festival that has switched to renewable energy on-site and runs a fleet of electric vehicles may still carry the vast majority of its total footprint in Scope 3, because audience travel, vendor supply chains, and freight logistics are all Scope 3 categories.

Measuring and reducing Scope 1 and 2 is necessary. It is not sufficient. Scope 3 is where the material impact sits, and increasingly, it is where regulators, investors, and supply chain partners are looking.

The 15 Categories: A Quick Map

The GHG Protocol organises Scope 3 into two groups.

Upstream categories (1 to 8) cover activities connected to the goods and services coming into your business: purchased goods and services, capital goods, fuel and energy-related activities not covered in Scope 1 or 2, upstream transportation and distribution, waste generated in operations, business travel, employee commuting, and upstream leased assets.

Downstream categories (9 to 15) cover activities connected to what leaves your business: downstream transportation and distribution, processing of sold products, use of sold products, end-of-life treatment of sold products, downstream leased assets, franchises, and investments.

Not all of these will be relevant to every organisation. What follows is a focus on the categories that consistently emerge as the most significant for businesses operating in music, media and entertainment.

The Categories That Matter Most for Music, Media and Entertainment

Category 1: Purchased Goods and Services

This is, for most businesses in the sector, the largest single Scope 3 category. It covers the emissions associated with everything you buy: production equipment, staging and rigging, sound and lighting, costumes, merchandise, catering supplies, broadcast technology, digital infrastructure, and professional services.

For a major touring production, the embedded carbon in procured goods and services can be enormous. Every vendor in your supply chain has their own Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and those become your Scope 3 the moment you purchase from them. This is why sustainable procurement is not a peripheral concern: it is central to Scope 3 reduction.

For media and entertainment businesses, this category also includes the carbon cost of cloud computing, server infrastructure, and streaming delivery networks. Digital production is not emissions-free. The energy intensity of rendering, encoding, and distributing content at scale adds up, and it all sits here.

Category 4: Upstream Transportation and Distribution

For touring artists and live event productions, this is critical. It covers the emissions from transporting goods and materials before they reach you: equipment shipped from manufacturers to rental houses, freight moved between warehouses and venues, and logistics across international tours.

Supply chains in live entertainment are long and complex. A production touring across Europe or North America may be drawing on equipment from dozens of suppliers, moving it across thousands of miles via road freight, air freight, and sea freight. Each leg of that journey generates emissions that sit in Category 4.

Mapping and reducing upstream logistics emissions requires visibility into the supply chain that many organisations do not yet have. Building that visibility is a necessary first step.

Category 5: Waste Generated in Operations

Music events, film and TV productions, and broadcasting operations all generate significant volumes of waste. Category 5 covers the emissions associated with waste disposal: landfill, incineration, and composting all carry different emissions profiles.

For festivals and live events, waste generation can be substantial. Single-use plastics, food waste, and production materials disposed of after an event all contribute to this category. The emissions vary depending on how the waste is treated. Waste sent to landfill generates methane as it decomposes. Incineration generates CO2. Composting and recycling carry lower but non-zero emissions.

Waste reduction strategies, reuse programmes, and careful materials procurement all have a direct effect on Category 5 emissions.

Category 6: Business Travel

For music, media and entertainment businesses, business travel is often a significant emissions source. Artists and their teams fly between cities and countries. Executives travel for meetings, productions, and negotiations. Crews move between shoots. Journalists and publicists travel for junkets and launches.

Category 6 covers flights, train journeys, car hire, and hotel stays taken for business purposes. Aviation carries the highest emissions intensity of any travel mode. For businesses where air travel is frequent, this category can represent a very material proportion of total Scope 3 emissions.

Reduction strategies here include shifting meetings to video where appropriate, routing tours more efficiently, replacing short-haul flights with rail, and setting internal travel policies that reflect the emissions cost of each mode.

Category 11: Use of Sold Products

For media and entertainment businesses selling or licensing products that are used by consumers, Category 11 covers the emissions generated by that use. This category is particularly relevant to consumer electronics manufacturers and streaming platforms, but it applies more broadly.

For streaming services, the electricity consumed by users watching content on televisions, laptops, tablets, and smartphones sits in Category 11. For hardware businesses, it is the electricity consumed by the device over its lifetime. For video game publishers, it is the energy used by consoles and PCs running the game.

The scale of this category depends heavily on the product and the user base. For large streaming platforms with hundreds of millions of users, Category 11 can be one of the largest emissions categories in the entire footprint.

Category 13: Downstream Leased Assets

Where organisations lease assets to others, the emissions from operating those assets sit in Category 13. This is relevant to equipment rental businesses operating in the live events and production sectors, as well as to property businesses that lease venues.

If you own production equipment that you lease to touring productions or event organisers, the emissions generated by those lessees in operating that equipment are your Scope 3. This creates a reporting and reduction challenge, because the data sits with the lessee, not the lessor.

The Often-Overlooked Category: Audience and Fan Travel

There is one category that deserves particular attention for live events businesses, even though it sits across multiple GHG Protocol categories depending on how it is accounted for. Audience travel to and from events can represent the single largest slice of the total emissions footprint for a festival or live event.

When tens of thousands of people drive, fly, or take public transport to attend an event, the emissions generated by that travel dwarf almost everything the production does. Shifting audience travel modes, improving access to public transport, and influencing how fans get to and from events is consequently one of the highest-impact levers available to event organisers.

This is an area where many organisations feel they have limited control, because they do not own the transport. That is partially true, but the framing of the event, the transport options promoted, the venue location, and the ticketing decisions all influence travel behaviour. Influence is not the same as control, but it is not nothing.

Where to Start

The 15 categories can feel overwhelming if approached all at once. The more productive approach is to identify, through an initial screening assessment, which categories are most likely to be material for your specific business, and then to build data collection processes around those first.

For a touring production, Categories 1, 4, 6 and audience travel will almost certainly be priorities. For a streaming platform or broadcaster, Category 11 and the emissions embedded in digital infrastructure will rank highly. For a merchandise or physical goods business, Categories 1 and 12 (end-of-life treatment of sold products) will demand attention.

Getting the prioritisation right saves significant time and resource. Getting it wrong means spending months collecting data on categories that turn out to be immaterial, while the categories that actually drive your footprint go unmeasured.

Hope Solutions: Scope 3 Expertise Built for This Sector

Hope Solutions works exclusively with businesses in music, media and entertainment. We understand how touring operations are structured, how production supply chains work, how digital platforms generate and account for their emissions, and where the data is hard to find.

If you are beginning your Scope 3 measurement journey, or if you have existing data that you need help interpreting and acting on, we can help.

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