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.

Comments

Huge stretch

[dbrueck]

Call me when this ranks in the top 500 ways we waste energy or hurt the environment.

Re:Huge stretch

[Kohath]

It's a gateway drug. Next you'll be watching Twitch streams instead of attending climate awareness sentivity meetings.

It's a slippery slope. Very insidious. At the end, you become a petroleum geologist with a big Texas ranch, complete with a swimming pool and your own private heliport.

Re:Huge stretch

[Moblaster]

Is this whole question a big troll?

It takes thousands of times more energy to transport a CD from manufacturer to distribution center to consumer on the UPS/Amazon truck... or even more to store to consumer.

And your CD player is hooked up to a big wifi system anyway. And often you are streaming on a portable device that uses a miniscule amount of electricity.

What kind of broken carbon math is this?

Not even virtue signalling but

[RickyShade]

Now I can claim moral superiority because I'm an mp3 downloader instead of a streamer. Nice.

Invalid assumption

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Locality

[brian.stinar]

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.

Marginal cost is what is important

[jrumney]

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.

And the server hosting that article is different?

[Pezbian]

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.

Missing the point

[Trogre]

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.