The World’s Most Natural Talent
Sounds Right is a new music initiative to recognise the value of nature, prompt conversation, raise funds for conservation through an innovative mechanism, as well as inspire millions of fans to take action. By simply listening to a Sounds Right track on various music streaming platforms – pure nature sounds or human artists featuring NATURE – music fans will directly protect the environment through a portion of royalties being disbursed to high-impact conservation initiatives.
It is an initiative by Museum for the United Nations – UN Live, developed and delivered in close partnership with musicians, creatives, nature sound recordists, as well as environmental, campaigning and global advocacy organisations.
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Teams from The Listening Planet and VozTerra have spent decades recording sounds of the natural world, allowing new audiences to appreciate NATURE’s beauty, diversity and fragility. Recordings like this can be used to monitor the health of ecosystems, support the design of biodiversity conservation projects, and even improve the mood of listeners. Initial tracks by the artist NATURE will mainly feature NATURE recordings from initiative partners, but our ambition is to enable anyone with recordings of NATURE to upload them to a public database that artists can use to create new music and acoustic ecologists can access to monitor the health of the ecosystems we inhabit.
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4.6 billion years ago a star was born. With timeless classics such as ocean waves, wind, rainstorms and birdsong, nature has inspired much of the music we listen to today. Now fans can listen to NATURE via her own artist profiles on all major streaming platforms, including both ambient nature sounds to relax to or be inspired by (check out the Ecosystem Sounds playlist) as well as ‘Feat. NATURE’ tracks where global artists bring sounds of the natural world into their music. While we allow artists and producers complete discretion to record and use the nature sounds they like, our partners at The Listening Planet and VozTerra have provided many of the nature sounds used in Feat. NATURE tracks (and are credited accordingly).
NATURE is an artistic construct - formed by Sounds Right partners - to recognise NATURE's contribution to music and ensure funds flow back to biodiversity conservation and restoration initiatives. The artist persona allows artists to use sounds of NATURE and donate part of their royalties to conservation initiatives, as managed by a diverse and representative Executive Advisory Panel. The Sounds Right initiative does not claim exclusive rights to nature’s creations, but instead provides an innovative and long-term mechanism for financing nature’s conservation. In the near future, NATURE will be an artist that anyone can collaborate with, seeding a new model for creative partnership with the natural world while generating royalties for biodiversity conservation and restoration projects. -
NATURE’s royalties and donations are collected by EarthPercent, a registered charity in England and Wales and a registered nonprofit foundation in the United States. EarthPercent distributes these funds to rights-based NATURE conservation and restoration projects in the world’s most precious and precarious ecosystems under the guidance of the Sounds Right Expert Advisory Panel, a group of world-leading biologists, environmental activists, Indigenous People’s representatives, and experts in conservation funding. Grant-giving focuses on conservation initiatives with proven models of ecological impact and community-centered approaches. In 2024, the fund committed $225,000 to four conservation programs in the Tropical Andes, the world’s most diverse biodiversity hotspot. Namely, Reserva Natural La Planada, Fundación Proyecto Tití, FundaExpresion, and Jacana Jacana. In 2025, the Fund will direct NATURE’s income towards the Key Biodiversity Areas including those in the Amazon and the Congo Basin.
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The greatest artist of all time has never been credited for her work. At least not at any great scale. Via the Sounds Right initiative, 90% of NATURE's music income and corporate donations go to biodiversity conservation, with the remaining 10% used to cover ongoing initiative costs, like artist outreach, music production, managing the conservation fund, and managing valuable partnerships. NATURE receives at least 50% of the post-distribution recording royalties, with the other share kept by artists and their rights holders. 100% of top-up donations from the public via NATURE's GoFundMe go to the Sounds Right Fund
Wondering how the Sounds Right initiative is funded? The majority of core costs are covered by third-party grants (see partners section at the end of the website), and the initiative is sustained long-term through 10% of corporate donations and music income.
With Sounds Right, NATURE has now been registered as an artist on various music streaming platforms, and owns its own Nature sounds. By simply listening to a Sounds Right track – pure nature sounds or human artists featuring NATURE – fan and music lovers will directly protect the environment through a portion of royalties being disbursed to high-impact conservation initiatives.
Sounds Right works with artists to encourage millions of music listeners to take further actions to conserve nature and become fans of NATURE, from recording the dawn chorus to support biomonitoring, to creating broad scale awareness and behaviour change. It is anticipated that it will engage 600 million people across the globe and raise $40 million dollars for nature conservation.
Sounds Right Programme Updates
The world is calling for us. And it has been for a really long time. We can feel deep inside of our very core, that something is wrong. Working with my friend FREDRIK on ‘A Soul With No King’ has mended something in me. I understand where my anger comes from. And what to do with it. And having Brian Eno do a remix of our baby has been a dream. He and I are so connected, it felt very right to do something together. For the Earth. From the Earth.
— AURORA,singer-songwriter and record producer
From big bang to big shot: How NATURE became an official artist
“Sounds Right is a groundbreaking music movement. It unites people around the world in a shared commitment, recognizing the intrinsic value of nature. Together, we must act now to protect our planet for our common future.”
Melissa Fleming,
United Nations Under-Secretary-General
for Global Communications
How the royalties
flow back to Nature
The Sounds Right initiative is not a one off, but the start of a broader push for Nature, with inbuilt heart beats, regular track releases, and discussions about the value of nature across the globe. The Sounds Right launch will break new ground by presenting Nature as a music artist, and by having created a new credible and scalable innovative finance mechanism to capture music royalties and distribute them to high-impact conservation projects around the world.
While interspecies communication has made some progress in recent years, we’ve had to rely on making a few assumptions on behalf of Nature.
In addition to fans generating funds by listening to the amazing artists from around the world who are releasing new or remixed tracks that are enhanced by sounds of the natural world, there’s an additional opportunity within this initiative. To spark conversations about how Nature can - and should - be valued in our society and economic model. More often than not we have a purely extractive relationship with the environment, either treating it as a resource to be optimally exploited or a ‘waste sink’ to dump our rubbish and pollutants. Sounds Right partners have created a simple mechanism that goes some way to properly valuing nature for its creative contributions to music.
The dream is to inspire and support fans of NATURE to take further environmental action, whether at a household level or advocating for societal changes that redress our extractive relationship with nature.
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First, that she’d prioritise conserving and restoring ecosystems with the greatest levels of biodiversity and endemism. Our analysis together with strategic advisory partners identified the following natural landscapes to be prioritised for funding: Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands; Indo-Burma; Sundaland; Philippines; Tropical Andes; and, the Atlantic Forest. The Fund is in addition exploring how artists may also direct royalties to priority ecosystems. As the fund evolves, it will focus on additional landscapes.
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Second, that she’d want the money to be spent in the most effective and ethical way. Only rights-based projects with proven models of ecological and community impact will be funded, and they should be delivered by organisations with the right capabilities then their impact robustly evaluated. She’d pay special attention to local projects and initiatives that are effective in protecting biodiversity strongholds, and have measurable impact.
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And finally, in the absence of being able to speak for herself, that she’d want to be represented by Indigenous Peoples who are some of her most critical guardians (who carry the biggest burden in protecting our natural world) as well as leading conservation scientists and practitioners. Further, her representatives should mainly be from the Global South since that is where most of the landscapes we hope to support are based.
Expert advisory panel
The Sounds Right Conservation Fund, hosted by EarthPercent, will be initially overseen by an independent Expert Advisory Panel, consisting primarily of Global South conservationists.
The Panel collectively holds expertise in conservation science, rights-based approaches (including advocacy for the rights of communities and Indigenous Peoples), as well as conservation focused program implementation, strategic advisory, and fund management. See the board members below:
David Emmett (Conservation scientist, head biodiversity conservation partnerships at Hempel Foundation, and conservation impact investment advisor).
Dr. Shivani Bhalla (Award winning conservation scientist protecting 4,500km2 with Samburu community in Kenya; developed an open source framework on community driven decision making).
Mindahi Bastida (Director of Original Nations Program; Expert on biodiversity, Indigenous knowledge and related topics; UNESCO consultant on sacred sites and bioculture).
Kavita Prakash-Mani (Founder of multiple Asia-based conservation organizations such as Mandai Nature and Grow Asia and was the Global Conservation Director at WWF International).
Professor Julia P. G. Jones (Conservation scientist specializing in impact evaluation for equitable and inclusive conservation).
Partners
Sounds Right was developed in consultation with the United Nations Department of Global Communications, along with founding partners: Earth Percent, The Listening Planet, VozTerra, Earthrise, Hempel Foundation, Community Arts Network, Dawn Chorus, LD Communications, Dalberg, Axum, Music Declares Emergency, Limbo Music, Count Us In, AKQA, LD Communications, Eleutheria and Rare. Spotify is supporting Sounds Right's global launch through access to its extensive platform in support of nature conservation. Sounds Right is also joining forces with The Nature Conservancy and Wildlife Conservation Society to encourage millions of music fans around the globe to recognise the value of nature and to inspire them to take action.
Hempel Foundation provided catalytic funding and strategic direction to elevate the programme into a global initiative that taps into the power of popular culture for biodiversity conservation.
Sounds Right partners
Sounds Right collaborators
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