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How Streaming Music Could Be Harming the Planet (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Current digital technology gives us flawless music quality without physical deterioration. Music is easy to copy and upload, and can be streamed online without downloading. Since our digital music is less tangible than vinyl or CDs, surely it must be more environmentally friendly? Even though new formats are material-free, that doesn't mean they don't have an environmental impact. The electronic files we download are stored on active, cooled servers. The information is then retrieved and transmitted across the network to a router, which is transferred by wi-fi to our electronic devices. This happens every time we stream a track, which costs energy. Once vinyl or a CD is purchased, it can be played over and over again, the only carbon cost coming from running the record player. However, if we listen to our streamed music using a hi-fi sound system it's estimated to use 107 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, costing about $20 to run. A CD player uses 34.7 kilowatt hours a year and costs about $7 to run.
So, which is the greener option? It depends on many things, including how many times you listen to your music. If you only listen to a track a couple of times, then streaming is the best option. If you listen repeatedly, a physical copy is best -- streaming an album over the internet more than 27 times will likely use more energy than it takes to produce and manufacture a CD. If you want to reduce your impact on the environment, then vintage vinyl could be a great physical option. For online music, local storage on phones, computers or local network drives keeps the data closer to the user and will reduce the need for streaming over distance from remote severs across a power-hungry network.
So, which is the greener option? It depends on many things, including how many times you listen to your music. If you only listen to a track a couple of times, then streaming is the best option. If you listen repeatedly, a physical copy is best -- streaming an album over the internet more than 27 times will likely use more energy than it takes to produce and manufacture a CD. If you want to reduce your impact on the environment, then vintage vinyl could be a great physical option. For online music, local storage on phones, computers or local network drives keeps the data closer to the user and will reduce the need for streaming over distance from remote severs across a power-hungry network.
Call me when this ranks in the top 500 ways we waste energy or hurt the environment.
Does this take into consideration that the network devices that they're measuring are multi-purposed? I sure as hell do a LOT more than just stream music on my gigabit internet connection. So now the energy consumption needs to be divided by the bandwidth consumption of music, which is extremely minimal, to figure out how much it REALLY uses.
(inb4 99% of bandwidth is pr0nz)
Here is a big âoeWho gives a shitâ for this.
Now I can claim moral superiority because I'm an mp3 downloader instead of a streamer. Nice.
Here is a big who gives a shit for this.
Most people don't use a high power hi-fi system to play streaming music. Most people use their earbuds or headphones, which have drastically cut power consumption from the old days, and are driven by low power devices. The average set top box now uses about 1/10th the power it did back in 2000. The main problem is people who still use high fidelity for sound quality that is already digital in origin. But if you have a powerwall and some solar panels and/or wind turbines, you're still green and golden.
Adapt. You're out of time to have excuses. It would have been 3x cheaper if you did it in 2010. Price will only increase.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
1 CD, 1 listener. 1 "music file", many millions of listeners. Enough said.
As someone that wrote an IEEE paper literally on energy trade-offs on computation versus communication, and presented it at an international conference, this BBC article is a bunch of hype.
This argument assumes that streaming is always streamed, from a server someplace else. ANY time there is ANY kind of offline ability to listen, that file has been cached locally.
The problem isn't streaming media, despite how much we may like or hate the idea.
Server Farms and networking hubs can probably operate greener, with more renewable energy sources. Being that these Server Farms could be nearly anywhere, that fixes a lot of problems that hour homes and other businesses may have. You can have your Data Center next to a river or even a creak, in an open area that you can cover it with solar panels, or in a windy location.
I don't fall for Zero Emissions nonsense, but we can always strive for better.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The article compares the end cost of running a CD or record player to all the costs associated with streaming. This is not a fair comparison. The media companies are likely storing those songs for other purposes anyway, so the cooling cost of the servers that are storing the music online is not attributable to streaming alone, and certainly they are spreading those costs over thousands of streamers, so they are not attributable to a single instance of the stream. Likewise, the network equipment at your end is likely on for other reasons as well, not just for streaming. So you need to calculate the marginal additional cost that streaming puts on all that equipment, which is likely orders of magnitude lower than the full costs the article is trying to push onto streaming to make their hipster point that vinyl is the environmentally friendly option.
I haven't done the analysis myself, but my gut feeling is that the primitive motors that power mechanical spinning things will end up using more energy than solid state storage and distribution. Also your record player is likely hooked up to an inefficient class AB or even class A amp, while a modern streaming audio player is more likely to use a class D amp, which is where the real energy savings are going to be.
More to the point, if they were listening to streaming music on that nice sound system, they would probably be listening to cds on it too, so it's irrelevant.
Your streaming music is a sin against the planet. The Council of the Green does hereby issue a fatwa against your Spotify and your Apple Music. But not Amazon Music Unlimited or Tencent Music, they made a nice donation to the Earth Day vegan BBQ.
and not the first which is the production machinery, usage of heat energy, C02 emissions from using the machines needed to harness the metals as well as their gas vapors. The article does not account for battery production, recycling energy and so on used to play music from the mass produced devices all to hear the sound of a mutated monkey scream and banging metallic drums (actually, how much energy is needed to produce drumsticks, vocoders,tuba, etc, and mastering equipment?) being propelled through the air. Our planet thanks us kindly.
http://gamehacking.org/vb/threads/12747-nensondubois-codes http://twitter.com/nensondubois_
It used to be a joke that the Enivrowackos wanted us all living in caves and scrounging for nuts and twigs.
But clearly, this steaming pile of shit from the BBC shows the path they want us on leads to caves.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Some people just have way too much spare time on their hands.
Recycle Aluminium. It's basically electricity in solid form, considering the crazy energy involved in refining Bauxite.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Vinyl records were huge. CDs were smaller. microSD cards are much smaller.
Encoding an MP3 in realtime was easy in 1999. Streaming was impossible over dialup.
People don't generally run 5.1 Surround and even seem happy with Mono Bluetooth speakers.
Stereo is fine.
There's a limit to bandwidth required for an audio stream.
SSDs basically last forever when reading instead of writing and take laughably little power compared to HDDs.
CPU power is increasing.
The world's audio streaming needs will eventually be met by something the size of a Raspberry Pi.
The energy consumed by arranging rights and licenses to said music will dwarf (to put it lightly) the energy consumed by hosting it.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
So my Google Play music caches my entire library on the 64g MicroSD card on my phone or tablet.
Probably a way more green result, streamed/copied the first time, then playing off a MicroSD card on an energy efficient phone/tablet/etc., as compared to spinning CD's or repeated streaming.
People tend to listen to their music repeatedly, not on a one-off basis,so local cacheing goes a long way.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Any environmental benefit here is utterly negligible.
The bigger point is this:
Playing CD's or other locally-stored content is better than streaming because someone on the other side of the planet can't on a whim suddenly decide to stop you from playing it.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
And not only that, but Jazz music is the worst, so if you play jazz you're destroying the moral fabric of America!
---------- --------
From Ladies Home Journal, December, 1921
by John R. McMahon
Arguments as to Jazz being a Nation-wide Scourge
EXPERTS tell in this article the nation-wide aspects of our jazz scourge. They say legal prohibition of all dancing may come.
Unspeakable Jazz Must Go! It is worse than Saloon and Scarlet Vice, Testify Professional Dance Experts – Only a Few Cities are Curbing Evil.
A reform movement has been started by cities and volunteer groups. A committee of women is helping to regulate in Chicago.
It looks as if the common people are in reaction against “common" behavior. Decency is regaining popularity among those who work for a living.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Some people just have way too much spare time on their hands.
Recycle Aluminium. It's basically electricity in solid form, considering the crazy energy involved in refining Bauxite.
^^^^^This.
I read about this, and while I don't recall the exact numbers, the energy expended to get a pound of (new) aluminum compared to energy expended recycling aluminum was an insane difference, like 10,000 times or something. Maybe more, I might be off by an order of magnitude. But yeah, recycling aluminum is practically free compared to producing it in the first place.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Pirate once, download to local storage, play locally after that. Who needs streaming?
It assumes (A) it didn't take any energy to spin a physical disc (vinyl or plastic), and (B) that lots of songs you play a lot are not cached, and therefore take almost no energy to play.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Stupid people everywhere, spouting nonsense, pandering to enviro-maniacs.
Without storing!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
We could have been spending the last 19 years designing more and more efficient systems, but instead we've had to put all that effort into doing things more and more privately and in a decentralized way. Every time new technology was developed that did not treat the RIAA like a giant threat, they destroyed it. This is the consequence.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
This is slashdot - I'm sure very few of us clicked it.
This is a stupid article in general, and the option of storing digital music locally is certainly the best, but I do believe that there's a big waste in streaming music off YouTube. It's quite a common practice (at least in my close environment), and I also do it, playing video streams just to listen to music. Huge waste of bandwidth and processing power.
So the cdplayer itself isn't connected to the hifi soundsystem that is needed to hear the music?
This is really just a BS article.
So producing the CD's/vinyl records doesn't cost any energy? what do you think it costs to ship those cd's/records and store them in a shop?
again, this is just a BS article.
streaming an album over the internet more than 27 times will likely use more energy than it takes to produce and manufacture a CD.
Completely failing to account for the energy cost in disposing of the CD and returning its constituents to the ecosystem. And it's not just the CD - it's the CD case, the plastic it is wrapped in, the store receipt, the plastic bag from the store. Even if they accounted for all this on the manufacture side (I doubt it), they didn't account for it on the disposal side. No one ever thinks about the garbage, which is why we end up in the mess we are currently in. It takes a lot more than 27 listens worth of energy. At the end of the day heat dissipates a lot faster than plastic. Our planet constantly sheds heat on its night side. A few GigaJoules here and there makes no difference.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...just play this on your super-power, multistream, internet connected, CD impaired boom box.
Help me to understand this statement:
âoeHowever, if we listen to our streamed music using a hi-fi sound system it's estimated to use 107 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, costing about $20 to run. A CD player uses 34.7 kilowatt hours a year and costs about $7 to run.âoe
Am I to suppose that one would not also listen to said CD on the same âoehi-fi sound systemâ? What is the carbon footprint for burning straw men?
This article contains the is the same type of faulty logic that tells me my EV pollutes more than a gas engine.
"However, if we listen to our streamed music using a hi-fi sound system it’s estimated to use 107 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, costing about £15.00 to run. A CD player uses 34.7 kilowatt hours a year and costs £5 to run."
Where did they get this estimation from? What's a "hi-fi sound system" in this model? How many watts are the amps? Is the CD player a component hooked up to the same "hi-fi sound system" or is it a standalone device? CD players have motors and lasers, anyone who used a portable one knows it eats power much faster than an MP3 player. All those moving parts mean CD players break a lot faster than MP3 players. What about the cost of manufacturing and disposing of them? How did they actually calculate the CO2 cost of the infrastructure that streams music?
I could go on and on. This is just so stupid. I'm reminded of the scene from "Back to School" where Rodney Dangerfield laughs at the snobby professor and says, "Oh man, you left out a lot of stuff".
About the authors: "Sharon George is a lecturer in environmental science and Deirdre McKay is a reader in geography and environmental politics, both at Keele University"
What is a "reader in geography and environmental politics" anyway?
Yes but you can listen to a vinyl or CD multiple times. Try doing that on your phone! Oh wait the song is cached on your phone. And it requires no motors on my phone to replay a song... So not only is the delivery cheaper and more environmentally friendly, so is the repeat playback.
This article seems to manage to cover the transport of the digital media, but somehow misses the costs associated with producing and shipping the physical media... what a joke
I'm going to start a campaign against this environmentally destructive madness. Please donate. I accept only bitcoins.
I can also listen to an mp3 more than once. Winamp is going to save the planet, one album at a time.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I mean, I'm streaming on my computer right now, with small speakers that are plugged into a small wallwort. It's really going to run more power than a boombox? Or, more realistically, more than a) my dvd player, and my tuner combined?
Exactly, I come to the comments to see what the article was about.
Yea, so the solution here is "don't stream".
Download the mp3 once. Put it on your devices. Play as often as you'd like. I guarantee that takes a lot less energy than making a CD or streaming it across multiple devices every listen.
I refuse to sign
from tfa
"Modern records typically contain around 135g of PVC material with a carbon footprint of 0.5kg of carbon dioxide (based on 3.4kg of CO per 1kg of PVC). Sales of 4.1m records would produce 1.9 thousand tonnes of CO – not taking transport and packaging into account. That is the entire carbon footprint of almost 400 people per year."
if you don't count transport, buying the actual physical music might be better for the environment in some cases.
you know what, i'll just continue to stream...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Comparing streaming "using a hi-fi sound system" to listening to a CD on a portable player.
What is energy consumption of listening to that cd on that same "hi-fi sound system". I imagine it is about 9 nines % identical.