The world’s most natural talent
Sounds Right is a music initiative establishing nature as a top artist on major music platforms, now garnering over 500 million streams from over 30 million listeners worldwide. By simply listening to music that credits NATURE as an artist and features sounds of the natural world, fans can now direct royalties to conservation and restoration projects in our most precious and precarious ecosystems. Sounds Right is a proven model, showing how culture can mobilize millions of people and channel new funding into conservation.
Beyond generating conservation funding, Sounds Right pushes public discourse and policy around how we can—and should—better value nature in our societies. Sounds Right has featured in +600 media outlets with a potential audience of 4.2Bn people, and millions more engaging via social media. In 2025, NATURE beat globally renowned brands to win the Cannes Lion Grand Prix for Innovation, as well as +10 other major awards. Key to Sounds Right’s success is providing artists a platform to make music and engage their fans on the biodiversity crisis—in a way that’s authentic to what they are interested in.
Sound Right is led by the Museum for the United Nations – UN Live, developed and delivered in close partnership with musicians, streaming platforms , nature sound recordists, as well as environmental, campaigning and global advocacy organisations. Now, Sounds Right seeks to scale up to financial sustainability and generate $5m/yr, at which point 10% of revenues cover ongoing program costs while channeling the remaining 90% to frontline nature conservation.
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With timeless classics such as ocean waves, wind, rainstorms and birdsong, nature has inspired much of the music we listen to today. 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.
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4.6 billion years ago a star was born. Now fans can listen to NATURE via her own artist profiles on all major streaming platforms, including pure soundscapes (check out the Ecosystem Sounds playlist) as well as ‘Feat. NATURE’ tracks where global artists bring sounds of the natural world into their music.
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 (see Funding Nature’s Conservation and Restoration’ dropdown for more). We do not claim exclusive rights to nature’s creations, but instead provide an innovative and long-term mechanism for financing nature’s conservation. Now, active artists can self-release and be part of Sounds Right via our distribution platform,, seeding a new model for creative partnership with the natural world while generating royalties for biodiversity conservation and restoration projects.
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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. By the end of 2026, the Sounds Right Fund will have disbursed over $1,000,000 to community-led initiatives across some of the world’s most biodiverse and critical ecosystems, including the Tropical Andes, Congo Basin, the Amazon Rainforest, and marine ecosystems across the Asia Pacific region. To learn more on the Sounds Right Fund, visit xyz.
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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.
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
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.
While interspecies communication has made some progress in recent years, we’ve had to rely on making a few assumptions on behalf of nature. To spark conversations about how nature can—and should—be valued in our society and economic model. The ultimate 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, and which at the same time have experienced substantial loss. Our initial analysis by strategic advisory partners led us to the Tropical Andes biodiversity hotspot, which holds about one-sixth of all plant life on the planet. We then included ecosystems in the Congo Basin and the Amazon Basin, crucial rainforest ecosystems often referred to as the ‘lungs of the earth’. In 2026, the portfolio expands to marine ecosystems in the Asia-Pacific region. The Fund is also exploring how artists may 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, she'd want to be represented by her stewards, including 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 Fund, hosted by EarthPercent, is governed 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
Global Impact Partners: Museum for the UN, AKQA, EarthPercent, Hempel Foundation, Spotify, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark
Creative, Strategy, & Distribution Partners: The Listening Planet, eleutheria, limbo music, L-Acoustics, DistroDirect, Axum, cue, The Nat,
Activation & Nature Connection Partners: Vozterra, William Demant Foundation, 15 Juni Fonden, Aage V. Jensen Naturfond, Plot Shift media, Concito, VEGA, WellcomeTrust
Advocacy & Media Partners: LD Comms, No. 29, The World We Want, earthrise
Founding Pilot Partners: Community Arts Network, Dawn Chorus, Music Declares Emergency, Rare
Sounds Right collaborators
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