- Posted on April 1st, 2025
Remembering and Celebrating Horst Weidenmüller
We first met Horst online, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, via our mutual wonderful friend Jacob Bilabel from the Green Music Initiative/Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit, when IMPALA convened a working group to elaborate a climate strategy for independent labels in Europe.
From that first moment, Horst had a clarity of vision that never wavered. Climate action was business critical not just to his own label, but to the wider independent community at large: the question was never whether to do something, but how.
In the process, he not only steered !K7 through the process of becoming one of the only B Corp Certified labels in the world, but continued raising the ambition of what collective action by the sector could look like.
The IMPALA Environmental Sustainability programme has been the collective work of many, but we doubt a single one of them would deny that without Horst, it wouldn’t exist at all.
He was unusual in his level of involvement as a founder and label head. In the last four years, we have spent countless hours on video calls with him shaping the programme, and in turn he would go out to various other boards and senior executives to corral their support. And he was tireless in helping others join the journey of climate action: we have a keen memory of how, in one IMPALA peer-to-peer learning session, he without hesitation shared his personal email with one of the smaller labels on the call struggling to get their heads around some of their environmental data.
And he was unafraid to embrace complexity when it emerged. From thinking of net zero as maybe mostly a problem of knowing how much to offset (a not uncommon narrative at the time), within a short time he was not only overseeing !K7’s own emissions reduction strategy, but also debating the subtleties of carbon pricing, climate investments, the shortcomings of offsets, and ultimately taking a seat on the advisory board of Murmur to create a different vehicle for the recorded sector to collectively invest in decarbonisation.
He wielded his power with great generosity and mutual respect. Always open to taking on board expertise from others (in our case, on climate) and meeting it with his own from the trenches of what it takes to build and run a successful independent music business. He would demand workable solutions, and while you were busy working something out, he’d be quietly doing his own thing elsewhere and suddenly re-emerge with two other problems resolved. He could exert authority, but never in a way that made you feel less than, and we have learned so much with him.
His focus last year was on how to build out the business case for climate action. Among other things, this would involve interviews with different label heads speaking on the benefits their businesses had experienced. We suggested that maybe the real story was less in financial savings, employee happiness and retention, the regulatory and legislative drivers of change, but in their own personal purpose – at the end of the day, wasn’t Horst driven primarily by purpose, and wasn’t that a story worth sharing?
But he was insistent that any mention of his own individual values shouldn’t overshadow the simple fact that addressing environmental sustainability had made !K7 a stronger and better business, and that it would make the independent music sector as a whole stronger and better, too.
Perhaps at the end of the day his absolute purpose and dedication to the business of independent music (on issues far beyond climate) was ultimately the same as his purpose and dedication to climate action.
And he was frustrated, sometimes, at still sitting in board rooms where the wider culture of status and money felt so disconnected from the serious ecological (and regulatory, and financial, and business) realities of the climate crisis, and where, if he pointed this out, it was still so easy to shut him down with a ‘there comes Horst with the climate stuff again’. He was impatient for others to follow where he, !K7, and the IMPALA Environmental Sustainability Taskforce had led.
He leaves behind an immeasurable gap. As we feel his loss, we also celebrate his memory and everything he has set in motion. We hope many more will join us in doing the same – asking how we might all be a little bit more Horst today.
Further links
More on !K7’s climate action commitments
More on the IMPALA Environmental Sustainability work