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Environmental Impact of Music Streaming?

posted by janrinok on Monday February 18 2019, @06:54PM   
from the it-makes-sense dept.

takyon writes:

How streaming music could be harming the planet

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 £15.00 to run. A CD player uses 34.7 kilowatt hours a year and costs £5 to run.

Solution: Use a smartphone or laptop with headphones unless you are playing music for guests. Download the songs you play repeatedly.

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Original Submission

• Transportation and storage?Transportation and storage? (Score: 3, Insightful) by mth on Tuesday February 19 2019, @02:14AM (1 child)

  by mth (2848) on Tuesday February 19 2019, @02:14AM (#803308) Homepage

  streaming an album over the internet more than 27 times will likely use more energy than it takes to produce and manufacture a CD

  I don't know it is was just left out of the summary or also out of the calculation, but transport and storage for physical media could be significant. Albums don't teleport from the factory to people's homes, they go through one or more distributors, who have to keep inventory. Probably this is less demanding than a server room, but still they would need some climate control to avoid problems with humidity. And most end users aren't going to be living next door to the factory, although if transport batches are large enough, it can be relatively efficient (never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes).

  Also, 27 times is quite a lot. There are certainly a few albums that I've played more than that, but probably more that I haven't played that often. Over time, the average play count will go up, but at the same time data centers and networking become more efficient while a larger portion of energy will come from renewable sources. So the environmental impact of streaming is likely to drop faster than the play count rises, making the trade-off worse for physical media.

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• Re:Transportation and storage?(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Thursday February 21 2019, @12:05AM

  by etherscythe (937) on Thursday February 21 2019, @12:05AM (#804305) Journal

  Consider, too: that CD being played isn't free energy, nor a perpetual motion machine. The motor spinning that plastic up is probably a lot more wasteful than the motor spinning the high-capacity hard drive in the datacenter, divided among all the users pulling data from it. Best efficiency is solid-state storage, but that's a significant $/GB overall cost difference; energy costing what it does, you'd take years just to break even on the hardware. Some people have critical illnesses to pay for with that money, right now.

  --
  "Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"

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