AKQA wins Grand Prix for Spotify nature fund-raiser

‘NATURE’ is now an officially-verified artist on Spotify with more than 150 million streams, thanks to an initiative designed to route music royalties towards conservation. The Sounds Right project was devised by AKQA, Copenhagen, for the Museum for the United Nations and Spotify, and has won the 2025 Cannes Lions Innovation Grand Prix.

It involved recording sounds of nature and wildlife then making them available for artists to use in their new songs. ‘Nature’ was credited as an artist on those tracks, thus earning royalties that were then distributed to conservation projects.

Courtney Brown Warren

170 tracks were released in the first year of the project from artists including Aurora, Brian Eno, Ellie Goulding, Bomba Estéreo, Hozier and London Grammar, attracting more than 14 million listeners. The first donations — $225,000 of funding for conservation projects in Colombia — were made in October 2024, six months after the launch.

“The campaign stood out because it was just innovative thinking. They came up with a really interesting way to drive royalties and to take those funds and put it back into nature conservation,” said Jury President Courtney Brown Warren, chief marketing officer at Kickstarter.

“They’re already scaling past music into gaming. We saw that it could have real-world, long-term impact, and that’s what we were looking for.” Sustainability was part of a wider theme in the Innovation category this year.

“It wasn’t so much about stopping using things, but reuse of materials,” Warren said. “And across the board we had a number of ideas grounded in betterment for the world, accessibility, helping others and sustainability.”

“We were looking for impact, for scale, for creative disruption and for work that we thought would stand the test of time,” Warren added.

One Gold was awarded in the category, to FCB Chicago’s ‘Caption With Intention’, which also won the Grand Prix for Brand Experience & Activation.