We Were Never Here to Paint the Walls

There is a LinkedIn article doing the rounds that we think everyone working in sustainability should read. Written by Matteo Deidda Global Net Zero Lead at Tide, "Less Painter, More Plumber" makes the case that sustainability professionals spent years making things look good on the wall, and not enough time making sure the pipes actually worked. And when budgets tightened and priorities shifted, it was the painting that came down first.

It is a sharp, honest piece of thinking. And it got us reflecting on our own work here at Hope Solutions, and on the industry we serve.

Because when we look at where sustainability sits inside most music and entertainment organisations today, we recognise exactly what Matteo is describing. We have seen the beautiful frameworks. We have sat in the rooms where net zero targets were announced with real conviction. We have watched organisations invest in the language of purpose. And we have also watched some of those same organisations quietly walk it all back when the commercial pressure came.

So we want to share how we think about this. Not as a criticism of the sector, but as an honest account of what we believe our work is actually for.

The Music Industry Has a Particular Relationship With the Painting

Here is something that makes our sector a little different from the corporate world Matteo is primarily addressing. In music and live events, the painting is genuinely part of the product. Audiences come to festivals for the experience. Artists build careers on meaning and identity. Promoters and venues compete on culture, not just price. So when we say that sustainability became a branding exercise, we do not mean that everyone was being cynical. For many, it was a sincere expression of values.

But sincerity is not the same as infrastructure.

You can have a genuinely values-led festival and still have a supply chain that nobody has audited. You can have an artist who cares deeply about climate justice and still be touring in a way that has never been costed or optimised. You can have a venue with bold public commitments and still have energy contracts, waste systems, and procurement decisions that were made years ago and have never been revisited.

The painting was often real. The plumbing was often missing.

What "Plumbing" Looks Like in Our World

Matteo's framework is built around three shifts: accepting that sustainability is not special, learning to speak in terms of value rather than virtue, and working towards a future where sustainability is embedded into the decisions the business already makes.

We could not agree more. And in the music and live events space, each of those shifts has a specific, practical shape.

Accepting that sustainability is not special means understanding that the festival operations manager who is also managing artist logistics, site safety, licensing, and a thousand other things is not going to prioritise a sustainability framework that feels like an extra layer on top of an already impossible job. It means understanding that the small independent venue cannot absorb the cost of a full sustainability audit on top of rising energy bills, staff costs, and declining footfall. Sustainability has to earn its place in the room, not assume it.

At Hope Solutions, this is why we focus on making sustainability work practical before we make it ambitious. The goal is not to have a policy that sits in a drawer. The goal is to change what people actually do on the ground, in the decisions they make every day, with the time and resources they actually have.

Speaking in value, not virtue is something our sector finds genuinely difficult, because it has built so much of its identity around values. But value and virtue are not opposites. They become opposites only when we use virtue as a substitute for the harder work of making the business case.

When we work with clients, we want them to be able to answer the questions that Matteo identifies: what happens to this organisation, specifically, if it does not do this? Not to the planet. To the revenue. To the audience relationship. To the ability to secure headliners, partnerships, and venue contracts in five years' time. To the licence to operate in local communities that are increasingly scrutinising the events they host.

The business case for sustainability in music and live events is genuinely strong. The sector runs on reputation. It depends on talent who increasingly have opinions about who they work with. It is regulated by local authorities who are asking harder questions about environmental impact. It is watched by audiences who do not forgive hypocrisy easily. These are not soft arguments. They are commercial ones.

Building the capability so the organisation does it itself is, for us, the whole point. Our measure of success is not the number of reports we write. It is whether the organisations we work with have sustainability genuinely woven into how they operate, long after we have stopped being involved.

That means working with bookers to understand what questions to ask when contracting artists. It means working with production teams to build environmental considerations into the technical rider and the site design from the start. It means helping finance teams understand the exposure that comes from not having a credible emissions reduction plan, and the opportunity that comes from having one.

Small team. Maximum leverage. That is the model. And it works only if the work goes into the infrastructure, not the image.

The Health and Safety Comparison Cuts Close to Home

Matteo uses health and safety as his model for where sustainability needs to go. Twenty years ago, large H&S teams were pushing safety culture into organisations that did not really want it. Today, health and safety is embedded. It is not a separate function so much as a shared responsibility. Everyone knows what to do when the fire alarm goes off.

In the live events industry, we know exactly what this looks like in practice. Because we have already done it with health and safety. The Event Safety Alliance, the Purple Guide, the licensing frameworks that govern every major show in the UK, these did not emerge from a branding exercise. They emerged from hard, unglamorous, often difficult work that changed what happens at the operational level, not just what appears in the annual report.

That is our reference point. That is the standard we are aiming for.

We Were Never Here to Paint the Walls

We want to be honest about something. At Hope Solutions, we are not always the most comfortable voice in the room. We are not here to tell you what your sustainability story should sound like. We are here to help you figure out whether what is behind the story actually holds up.

That sometimes means asking difficult questions. It means being more interested in what your contracts say than what your website says. It means being more focused on what decisions your team makes on a Tuesday afternoon than on what gets said at conference panels. It means caring more about whether the progress is real than about whether the progress looks good.

Matteo is right that the painting can come down. In fact, in the current climate, for many organisations, it already has. What cannot come down is the infrastructure. What cannot be cut is the thing that is genuinely load-bearing.

Our job is to help the organisations we work with build the kind of sustainability that is load-bearing. Not because it looks good on the wall. Because it is holding the whole building up.

If that resonates with where you are in your own sustainability journey, we would love to talk.

Inspired by Matteo Deidda's "Less Painter, More Plumber". Read it. It is worth your time.

‍