How Streaming Music Could Be Harming the Planet (bbc.com) 150
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.
Huge stretch (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me when this ranks in the top 500 ways we waste energy or hurt the environment.
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I can also listen to an mp3 more than once. Winamp is going to save the planet, one album at a time.
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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.
Caves and Twigs (Score:3)
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.
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TFA is designed to teach people how to think about the lifecycle emissions of things, and how to decide if they are beneficial or not. If you calm down a bit and read it in the light it was intended, it's a reasonable article.
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If they want us to think about lifecycle emissions, they should probably do a better job of calculating them. For instance, the word "cache" does not appear in the article even once. The pre-streaming status quo of keeping your own digital music library as superior to both the physical media and streaming options was not mentioned once.
Even the mentioning of CDs as not recyclable is straight-up retarded... as if CDs are a significant landfill problem... I can probably count on one hand how many CDs I've had
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That's like saying an article about fecal smearing is designed to make people think about what they eat.
Re:Huge stretch (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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This is slashdot - I'm sure very few of us clicked it.
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Exactly, I come to the comments to see what the article was about.
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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.
Hey hey, let's not get all "facty" here. We have standards on Slashdot and expect you not to exceed them.
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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?
Yes, the CD has to be manufactured and transported, which takes substantial energy. But the streaming server also has to be manufactured and transported, which also takes substantial energy. It's not at all obvious that the CD manufacturing and transportation take less energy.
The playback for the CD requires a motor, unless the CD is ripped.
The streaming server requires power for the system itself and building cooling, plus direct power and cooling for the entire network between the server and the client.
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The server costs are amortized across tens of thousands of users, which tips the scales significantly.
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The server costs are amortized across tens of thousands of users, which tips the scales significantly.
Yes, but the cost of one server is also orders of magnitude more expensive to manufacturer and transport. It's not clear which cost is greater per user.
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The answer however is that we need to download MP3s.
Exactly!
Obviously, pirating music is best for the planet.
You only download the song once, and can make infinite local copies of it. No need to stream over and over, just local playback.
Your entire music collection can fit onto a single external hard drive, removing the need to purchase vast amounts of storage media like CDs which store about 20 songs each.
The sharing of pirated music is mostly peer-to-peer, removing the need for large expensive server rooms.
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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?
My thoughts exactly. I had to double-check the source. It sounds like something spewed out of the mindless cretins at Wired.
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Call me when this ranks in the top 500 ways we waste energy or hurt the environment.
Ring RIng ... did you pay for streaming with Bitcoin?
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Call me when this ranks in the top 500 ways we waste energy or hurt the environment.
It’s an easy problem to fix though, just cache the music and age it out based on how often the user listens to a particular song. There is no reason to stream a track every time it is played except due to asinine concerns about piracy.
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Bbc... conservative... lol...
Flawed (Score:2)
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)
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Do you really think anybody under the age of 46 does this?
Get with the times, grandpa. Most people are not old neds.
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Some of them are old nellies.
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But none of them are Old Yeller.
Wow. (Score:2)
Not even virtue signalling but (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I can claim moral superiority because I'm an mp3 downloader instead of a streamer. Nice.
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You can do it even if compared to people using Audio CDs if you're using one of those tiny cheap MP3 devices.
No spinning or seeking motors, no freaking lasers, just a very low power seeping flash memory and a fast enough CPU.
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Yeah, take that sinners! The planet and her holy servants rebuke your mp3s as a sin against the land and the sea.
Repent now, the only way you can: by switching to vinyl! The righteous path follows the grooves.
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Who brought God into this?
The Planet, you mean? The Planet requires you to give up your sinful bit tunes and ride the phonographic grooves to environmental righteousness!
The songs of the land and the sea don't play on MP3. The atmosphere chills to vinyl. Let's all sing along.
Wow. (Score:1)
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I agree. They keep pilling on bullshit like this. Every time one of them says something stupid is destroying the planet just makes them look foolish and people stop taking the issue seriously. One week it was cow farts now its streaming music.
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One week it was cow farts now its streaming music.
Every year for Earth day (night) I turn on all of the lights in the house. For this, I'm going to start streaming cow farts.
But first, I have to find some cows to record. I've got some out back (I do! ) but first I'll need to find some musical cows to hit those high and low notes. More info as it becomes available.
This one [youtube.com] needs an autotuner.
Invalid assumption (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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For fossil fuels, yes. For renewables, prices will drop even more.
Author forgot this one fact. (Score:1)
Locality (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone that wrote an IEEE paper literally on energy trade-offs on computation versus communication, and presented it at an international conference [researchgate.net], 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.
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ANY time there is ANY kind of offline ability to listen, that file has been cached locally.
Wait, that's not true. Sure, there's some kind of caching, but they don't deliver the entire track at once. They just deliver enough to avoid skipping. That means that the server has to remain active, waiting to feed you the next part of the track, and so on. Or if I am playing mp3s from my file server, same thing. The whole file's not cached locally. My machine asks for the blocks as it needs them. Or, as is increasingly common, someone plays "music" by playing Youtube videos, in which case not only do the
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Sorry, should have said don't necessarily. Good for Spotify
Re: Locality (Score:2)
Yeah, if I can listen to it with my ears, I can record it. Probably in the same digital quality it came down as, but if not, then in some indistinguishable analog rip directly off the sound card...
It can get greener. (Score:2)
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 a
Marginal cost is what is important (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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n2ch
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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.
Stop sinning against the planet! (Score:2)
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.
This article describes the secondary env impact (Score:1)
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 a
And the server hosting that article is different? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Size matters. (Score:2)
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
Local Cache (Score:2)
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.
Missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
I hope they're not playing jazz (Score:3)
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.
Compromise... (Score:2)
Idiotic (Score:2)
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.
I see stupid people (Score:2)
Stupid people everywhere, spouting nonsense, pandering to enviro-maniacs.
Streaming IS downloading (Score:2)
Without storing!
This is the RIAA's fault (Score:1)
YouTube music streaming is the worst (Score:2)
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.
what BS. (Score:2)
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.
Wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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To save the environment... (Score:2)
Faulty logic (Score:1)
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?
twisted logic (Score:2)
This article contains the is the same type of faulty logic that tells me my EV pollutes more than a gas engine.
They pulled this out of their asses (Score:3)
"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?
Manufacturing and shipping? (Score:3)
I'm outraged. Accepting donations (Score:2)
I'm going to start a campaign against this environmentally destructive madness. Please donate. I accept only bitcoins.
stupid... because it doesn't consider power (Score:2)
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?
transport (Score:2)
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...
What a load of bullpucky (Score:2)
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.