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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 further take into consideration that lots of people download music that they frequently stream, and keep it cached on a flash device? SD cards are a lot tinier than CD's, so even if they both end up as land-fill, the SD card is going to be easier on the environment, won't it?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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! --
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 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.
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.
Some of them are old nellies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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...
This is slashdot - I'm sure very few of us clicked it.
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.
"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?
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