Meet the Musical Artists Who Are Paying Royalties to Nature

In the music world, nature is an undeniable star: Its range is impressive, and as a featured artist, its output is prolific. Countless musi­cians are inspired by other species’ vocal stylings. Some weave those sounds directly into their songs. 

Laws and norms give anyone license to use this material freely. The blackbird singing in “Blackbird” wasn’t asking the Beatles for an album credit, after all, and copyright rules don’t cover a whale’s melody. Now a small but growing movement of artists and scholars is pushing to recognize—and reimburse—the natural world for its contributions. It’s a question of recipro­city, says Earth rights scholar César Rodríguez­-Garavito, founder of the More-Than-Human-Life (MOTH) program at New York University School of Law: “Are there ways to acknowledge the contributions of nature to industry, to art, to other forms of human creativity?”

The Sounds Right initiative, led by the Museum for the United Nations–UN Live, prompts creators to embrace nature as a collaborator, symbolically and financially. Since the program’s April 2024 launch, more than 100 artists have participated, from chart-topping stars like Hozier and Ellie Goulding to up-and-coming musicians from around the world. When they incorporate field recordings into songs, they not only name NATURE as a featured artist; they also donate half of the royalties to conservation.

The effort has racked up more than 300 million listens on its partner platform, Spotify, says Iminza Mbwaya, associate director for Sounds Right. With the streaming profits, plus other licensing fees and donations, the program has committed more than $600,000 toward on-the-ground projects chosen by an independent advisory panel, with a focus on places where biodiversity is most threatened. To date, funds have gone to community groups working in the tropical Andes, Amazon, and Congo River Basin, Mbwaya says.

The artistic endeavor also aims to foreground nature in people’s daily lives. Sound conveys a potent sense of place, says Jenny Sturgeon, a Scottish singer-songwriter and former seabird ecologist. Her Sounds Right contribution was inspired by the field recordings she made while trekking across Scotland: owls calling, Osprey chicks begging, skylarks singing overhead. For her song “Shelter Me (feat. NATURE),” Sturgeon built on one of those soundscapes—a Song Thrush’s dusk chorus—with gentle synth, percussion, brass, and vocals. “I wanted it to be quite sparse, with space for the Song Thrush to shine through,” she says. “It was very much a fifty-fifty collaboration.”

Others remixed wild tones in inventive ways. To produce “In Purpose (feat. NATURE),” U.S.-based electronic artist Madame Gandhi sampled field recordings and transformed the audio to mimic synth sounds, drum hits, and beats. The result is a track crafted completely from “organic sound material,” including the gurgles of melting glaciers, which she recorded in Antarctica with a homemade hydrophone. Gandhi equates kicking funds back to the planet with paying a drummer for a studio session: “You don’t want to be out here exploiting nature, just capturing the sound and then profiting off of it.” 

While Sounds Right is voluntary, Rodríguez-Garavito and his MOTH colleagues want to enshrine nature’s creative rights into law. Their effort was born from a trip to Ecuador’s Los Cedros cloud forest. While sitting around a fire, Rodríguez­-Garavito and his companions, including the writer Robert Macfarlane and musician Cosmo Sheldrake, started composing a tune inspired by their surroundings. “I was wandering around, singing things into the phone, and basically this song just came together out of nowhere,” Sheldrake says. 

The group polished and released the track, featuring Sheldrake’s recordings of rustling leaves, honking Toucan Barbets, echolocating bats, and other forest dwellers. In 2024, they filed a petition with the copyright office in Ecuador, requesting legal recognition of the cloud forest itself as an author of the song. “For us, it was pretty obvious that the piece of music was being cocreated with the forest, right there on the spot,” says Rodríguez-Garavito. Though the filing was rejected, the MOTH team is appealing, hoping to take the case all the way to the Constitutional Court.

Choosing Ecuador for this test case was strategic. In 2008 the country was the first in the world to set out the Rights of Nature, or Pachamama, in its constitution, establishing its basic right to “exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate” and creating a legal avenue for people to sue on its behalf. More cities, states, tribes, and nations have taken similar steps in the past decade, opening the door for court cases against companies, governments, and other entities whose actions threaten ecosystems. “It’s this recognition that nature has the right to live and flourish and that there has to be some kind of mechanism that gives nature the right to defend itself when it’s hurt,” says Dana Zartner, a University of San Francisco’s professor who co­-authored a book about the Rights of Nature movement. 

The New Zealand government, for example, granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River in 2017, while Indigenous leaders in the Pacific similarly recognized whales and dolphins in 2024. Such moves have faced pushback, however: A “Lake Erie Bill of Rights” passed by residents of Toledo, Ohio, in 2019 was overturned after farmers argued that it created too much liability. For these laws to catch on broadly and have teeth, Zartner says, will require a mindset shift: people seeing themselves on the same level as other living things instead of at the top of a pyramid.

For Sheldrake, listening closely offers one powerful way to connect across species lines. He uses a range of tools to hear and record ecosystem sounds in the air, water, and even the unexpectedly noisy world of soil. When you truly tune in to nature, Sheldrake says, it is clear that the world doesn’t revolve around humans alone—and that our legal systems shouldn’t, either: “We just have to keep expanding this lens.”

This story originally ran in the Spring 2026 issue as “Nature, Remixed.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.