We can all be climate superstars, says AJR’s Adam Met

“What a warm welcome to be back on stage,” said Adam Met among chants of his name. But the screaming fans, world travel and a sold-out tour wasn’t enough to keep him around fulltime. “More than anything, I love being on stage,” he told the crowd. “But I love doing these other things too.”

He’s come a long way from tapdancing in Washington Square Park as a teen with his kid brothers, to completing a doctorate in human rights and sustainable development. Now 35 years old, the world has changed with him. Since his busking days in the park, the Climate March, just minutes away from where Met performed with brothers, mobilized hundreds of thousands of people. Greta Thunberg sparked an international movement. The United States is no longer a part of the Paris Agreement. And the 2020s have brought us some of the hottest years recorded. 

Met is now using what he’s learned about building a fanbase over the past 20 years to get people to care about climate. For him, that begins with changing how we tell stories. 

“We’ve tried doom and gloom,” he says. “But now we want even more people to join.” That requires us to ask, ‘what does the positive outlook of the future look like?’

How we talk about climate

According to the Center for Climate Change Communication, about two-thirds of voters in the US believe that global warming is affecting the cost of living. Met and others agree that that’s an opening to talk about climate as a kitchen table issue rather than throwing around numbers such as ‘1.5 degrees celsius’. He says, “net zero means nothing to most people when they’re just trying to figure out how to get food on their kid’s plate or get them to and from school.” 

Just as climate policy has changed over the past two decades, so has fans’ relationship to musicians. “The era of ‘shut up and sing’ is over,” Met says. “Fans have so much more access to artists than they ever did before, and they want this full cohesive understanding of who the artist is, and a lot of times that includes something that the artist cares about.”

Through his nonprofit, Planet Reimagined, Met ran a survey to test this. “We found out that more than 70% of fans want artists to engage in these issues,” he says. “So we’re looking at an overwhelming majority of people that will be totally fine if artists engage in social issues like this.”

But he says amplifying climate causes shouldn’t just be left to rock stars with two million TikTok followers. Micro-influencers are needed too. “You can influence your friends and your family to get involved in something,” he says. “And wouldn’t that be really fun to accomplish something really big together as a group for your community? That’s where people can start.”

The playbook on growing a fanbase

Met’s book Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action and Build a Better World, released in 2025, is a blueprint for anyone who wants to spread ideas. The book discusses how he built the AJR fanbase along with his brothers, and also features everyone from young liberal New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé to decades-long conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck.

Starting from zero, the band prioritized fans that were engaging the most. Met says the traditional way is to think of it as a ladder. “This ladder of engagement, where people go up one rung, they hear a song, they go up another rung, they’re like, “Oh, I want to follow that band on social media. They’ll buy a ticket to a show, buy merchandise, and go up and up and up this ladder.”

But in 2026 that plan falls short. He says a hurricane metaphor is more apt. “The hurricane model is you bring your new fans in closest to you, closest to the center, and if you think about it like a hurricane that’s kind of like a spiral, you give all of those fans the tools to then go out in the world and be evangelizers for the band or the social movement itself.” What’s key, Met says, is giving people ownership and power over the idea itself. 

“So many people want to make a difference, but they don’t have that spark, that event in their life that helps them get involved,” says Met. “And this book gives them from the beginning through the end what is the thing that they care about all the way through. How can they participate in it, and how can they get their community and friends and family involved?”

Along with his experience as a performer, Met takes a lesson from sociology, by relying on the concept of collective effervescence. “This is one of my favorite phrases ever,” he says. Coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim in the 19th century, collective effervescence is the intense emotional experience that can arise when people congregate. Durkheim was thinking about how religious experiences can lead to this. Intense feelings that emerge from collective effervescence can be joy, grief or vengeance.  

Think about the euphoria of your favorite team winning the World Cup or fans singing Taylor Swift lyrics in unison at her concert. Met says, “That energy is something that is so palpable and that’s what I wanted to take and use that for social good.” 

The power of getting together

His goal is to use the power of collective effervescence by linking the worlds of live music and activism. “Musicians have this power to gather people in person that very few others do,” he says. Another project of his nonprofit is to engage concertgoers around social issues. He’s partnered with companies such as Ticketmaster, to accomplish this. But he says for this to work, the social issue has to be relevant to locals. “Every single action was customized to that city we went to, and it was customized to that audience.”

AJR once put this into action at a show in Phoenix, Arizona. It was 109 degrees. The band encouraged fans to sign a petition to unlock dollars to combat extreme heat and produce more cooling zones and tree cover. This led to 1,000 signatures that night. “It was something that made sense for that city, and from our study, we figured out that local is absolutely the winner.”

This tactic also worked in the United Kingdom. Met’s nonprofit worked with Billie Eilish to get fans during her arena tour to sign a petition around a climate and nature bill in the works at the time. He said one fan in particular took the idea back to her community and now has 150 volunteers working on climate issues in her local area. “This is what we’re seeing all over the place,” says Met. “When you get involved in person, you can then take things back to your own community, and it explodes.”

“The hardest thing for people when they’re first engaging in something is to stay a part of it for a long time. And the way to do that is to get involved in something hyper local. Go to a city council meeting. Even if it’s trying to fill a pothole in front of your street, if you can get that first win all the studies have shown that makes people stay involved long term.” 

He predicts that as more people crave in-person events, concerts and other live events are a way to turn fans into advocates. “In person is what we’re going to see so much of over the next few years, because it’s almost a push back against the world of social media, so we see more and more people wanting to gather in person. Concerts are the way to do that.”

“This is the real way that fans can start engaging in climate and artists have the ability to get them to come together in person.”

This doesn’t mean celebrities have to start talking about climate science, says Met. There’s a balance to be struck. “They can focus on how we get food on our plate, they can focus on how we get to and from places, what waste systems look like, building new houses, health care, immigration, all of these are climate issues, and it’s way better if celebrities engage around those things that impact people’s day-to-day lives, because climate change is really far away and existential for a lot of people.”

Whether you’re a musician, or passionate citizen with 1,000 followers on Instagram, Met says having a message, drawing fans close to you and giving them ownership of the message, all while tapping into the collective, is the way for micro-influencers to spread their gospel. 

That night at Jones Beach, euphoria took center stage. For Met, this kind of bliss shouldn’t only be for concerts. When it comes to organizing around climate, he says tapping into collective joy may be the new way forward. “Let’s focus on hope and optimism in order to expand the audience.”