Can Music Fans Save The Planet? Adam Met of Indie-Pop Band AJR Thinks So

When musician Adam Met peers out at the audience from the stage of one of his shows, he doesn’t just see many thousands of fans pulsing to the beat of his band’s catchy indie-pop tunes. He sees an army of potential change makers who could help save the planet.

Met — the bass player and background vocalist for the NYC-based multiplatinum band AJR — is also a climate advocate with a PhD in human rights and sustainable development who teaches about climate campaigning and policy at Columbia University and worked with Congress and the White House on a bipartisan energy bill recently introduced into the Senate.

Fans tend to be passionate types, driven to share what they love both online and in person, and that devotion positions them as natural candidates to champion issues they care about, Met said over the phone from his home on New York’s Upper West Side on Friday.

“If we can use this power for good, we can take those people who are hyperpassionate and have them share across their different platforms,” said the 34-year-old musician, the “A” in AJR, which he co-founded with younger brothers Jack and Ryan. “They become micro-influencers for the causes themselves.”

Cultivating this fan-to-activist trajectory is a central theme of Met’s new book Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World. Drawing from his own experience growing a fan base — as he and his siblings progressed from performing in living rooms and busking on New York street corners to playing stadiums worldwide — he offers a blueprint for boosting awareness and igniting action, especially when it comes to saving the planet.

The book, out June 3, includes research into social movements and the power of live events and interviews with a range of artists, organizers and thinkers — among them, musician Ben Folds, comedian Jim Gaffigan, former U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang, scientist and entertainer Bill Nye, computer scientist and inventor Astro Teller and conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who attended an AJR show in Dallas and speaks with Met about the power of knowing your audience.

“We need fresh thinking to accelerate social change, particularly around climate, and the ideas in this book are creative and easy to implement,” political analyst, lawyer and author Van Jones said of Amplify.

The book takes its name from the Amplify initiative created by Planet Reimagined — the nonprofit Met co-founded to train and catalyze future climate leaders. The project aims to mobilize and empower audiences at live events to push for systemic change.

The Amplify push grew out of a Planet Reimagined study of the same name, conducted in collaboration with Ticketmaster, iHeartRadio, Green Nation and Reverb, an organization dedicated to creating a more sustainable music industry. The study polled thousands of live-music fans and found that three out of four care about climate change, support artists taking action on the issue and are ready to follow suit, especially when encouraged by their favorite musicians.

Concerts Meet Activism On AJR Tours

Last summer, AJR turned concerts on their national 21-city tour into on-site civic and political activist hubs where fans could register to vote, sign petitions, call their representatives urging them to vote for climate-positive policies, make donations and learn about local volunteer opportunities. Fifteen percent of the people who walked through the doors of AJR shows joined the effort.

“I know 15 doesn’t sound really big, but that is a huge percentage of people who are coming through the venue actually taking some sort of action,” Met said, adding that in the end, around 35,000 concertgoers made a climate-related move. Fans in Colorado wrote to the state legislature in support of phasing out fracking, for example, and in Wisconsin, they pledged to vote no on two state constitutional amendments that would have made it harder for the state to address climate change. Both amendments were later defeated.

Other artists are now adopting the Amplify model, including Grammy winner Billie Eilish, who will implement it on her U.K. tour this summer. Eilish did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the singer/songwriter has emerged as a vocal advocate for climate action who often addresses the topic in her music and on social media and has donated a portion of her tour ticket sales to climate justice initiatives.

Among artists, Met believes musicians are uniquely positioned to tell the sort of impactful stories that can trigger emotion and action. That’s because their work doesn’t rely solely on the music itself, but weaves visual art, merchandise and live performance into a multi-sensory message.

“When you see someone like Billie Eilish posting about climate change on Instagram and having music about it and incorporating it into her show,” he said, “it really screams authenticity.”

Singing About Inertia, And Fighting It

Though Met’s brothers Jack and Ryan write AJR’s songs, they share his commitment to climate advocacy, and lines that reference it have made their way into at least one of the trio’s tunes. “I was gonna save the planet, but today I got plans,” bops a line from fan favorite song “Inertia,” off of the band’s fifth studio album The Maybe Man.

The line has particular resonance for Met in 2025. “As the administration changed in January, I saw more and more people start to become more and more apathetic,” he said. “It’s disappointing, but I think that every time a door closes, five others open. I’m an eternal optimist in terms of climate.”

Fueling that optimism is the power of decision making at the local level.

“Community boards and local legislators decide on what zoning looks like, on what agriculture looks like, on where the next petrochemical plant gets placed, on what local transportation looks like and how that’s electrified or not electrified, how the gas and utility companies are allowed to do what they’re doing,” Met said. “Those are decisions that you have so much power over.”

So You Want To Fight Climate Change?

One of the first things Met suggests to anyone who approaches him expressing an interest in tackling climate change, in fact, is to think locally, and to find the role where they can hold the most sway.

“So many people say, ‘Oh, I want to start a campaign,’ and I always say ‘Look around to see what everyone else is doing first,’ because your contribution might be so much more effective if you join something that’s already gotten off the ground.

He’ll be reinforcing that message on AJR’s upcoming tour, which starts July 18, and on his book tour, kicking off this week. The latter will include some of the very strategies he addresses in the volume — gamification, entertainment and creating the energetic sense of community prone to inspire collective action. Clearly this is not someone hindered by the kind of inertia his band playfully describes in song. So how does Met manage to juggle his many roles?

On the morning we spoke, he’d been up since 4 a.m., but that was hardly evident from the energy or enthusiasm in his voice. “I sleep very rarely,” he said. “When you love all of these different things enough, you just make it work.”