“There are people I know who don´t fly private jets but they don´t talk about it….” Ben Turner, IMS Founder.
The International Music summit returned last week with Climate change at the top of it´s agenda.
Co-founder Ben Turner told me in this weeks episode, “ we are part of an industry that creates huge impact. DJs zigzag across the world on private jets. Live bands tend to tour in a much more cohesive, structured, strategic manner, whereas DJs don't. They go for the biggest money everywhere and they grab it so I think everybody has a big responsibility to play.¨
It was refreshing to hear Ben air the elephant in the room that many of us who love or live on Ibiza has thought about the last two years since tourism slowed down to a trickle of its normal influx. So what have we learned in the last two years away from business as usual?
“There were certainly organisations working hard to make changes here, but, Ibiza is an island. It's in a very challenging position. It needs tourism. It lives or dies by tourism. That was proven during the pandemic.¨
He contonued, “we all knew that, whether the government ever wanted to admit it, that Ibiza needed club tourism. Now I think it knows that it does, but certainly on a negative the private jets are at the forefront of the shift in our time. I didn't even know there was a private jet airport 15 years ago or 20 years ago. Now, you know, you can't even land on many occasions. So it's it's a huge shift as big money got into our industry. Big money has followed our music. Our music is now the most favourite or probably the most favoured music of the wealthy crowd. They all want to be around DJ culture for whatever reason. Ibiza is obviously the home of that. So, you know, unfortunately we're attracting it. It used to be the yachts coming in, now it's the jets, you know. So we you know, there's there's a huge challenge there. Huge challenge.”
We have all had a chance to dream of the idyllic image of what Ibiza might look like, if it had solved its tourism monoculture issues, but I asked Ben what he felt that might look like if he could imagine a perfect island scenario,
“ I think we would all maybe come by boat. That would be quite nice. If you think about the original people who came to this island and discovered Ibiza, you know, the hippies, who came on boats, that's the older Ibiza.
That's the spirit, the indigenous spirit of the island that you can still find in certain quarters and certain places.”
