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The price consumers have been willing to pay for listening to recorded music has never been lower, while the environmental impact of listening to music has never been higher, researchers have found. The economic costs of recorded music consumption have steadily fallen in recent decades while its carbon emissions costs have soared.
From a plastic pollution perspective, the good news is that overall plastic production in the recording industry has diminished since the heyday of vinyl. From the plastics perspective, in 1977 (the US sales peak of the LP) the recording industry used 58 million kilograms of plastic. In 1988 (the peak of cassette sales) the industry used 56 million kilograms of plastic. And in 2000 (the peak of CD sales) the industry used 61 million kilograms of plastic. Then, when downloading and streaming take over, the amount of plastics used by the US recording industry drops dramatically, down to around 8 million kilograms by 2016.
The figures suggest that the rise of downloading and streaming are making music more environmentally friendly. From a carbon emissions perspective, however, the transition towards streaming recorded music from internet-connected devices has resulted in significantly higher carbon emissions than at any previous point in the history of music. Storing and processing music online uses a tremendous amount of resources and energy—which has a high impact on the environment.
After translating the production of plastics and the generation of electricity (for storing and transmitting digital audio files) into greenhouse gas equivalents (GHGs), researchers found that the rise in streaming has led to an increasingly negative impact on the environment. While 140 million kilograms of GHGs were generated in 1977, 136 million kilograms in 1988, and 157 million in 2000, by 2016, the generation of GHGs by storing and transmitting digital music files was estimated to be between 200-350 million kilograms in the U.S. alone.
The research also shows that while the environmental cost of music consumption has never been higher, the price consumers are willing to pay for music has never been lower. In 1997, consumers were willing to pay roughly 4.83% of an average weekly salary. That percentage decreased to roughly 1.22% of an average weekly salary in 2013. With the advent of streaming, of course, the business model of consuming recorded music changed: what used to be a commodity industry, where people bought copies to own, is now a service industry in which they buy temporary access to a music experience stored in the cloud. For just $9.99—barely 1% of the current average weekly salary in the US—consumers now have unlimited ad-free access to almost all recorded music ever released via platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Pandora, and Amazon.
To fairly compare past and present, you would have to factor in the emissions involved in making the devices on which we have listened to music in different eras. You would need to look at the fuel burned in distributing LPs or CDs to music stores, plus the costs of distributing music players then and now. There are the emissions from the recording studios and the emissions involved in making the musical instruments used in the recording process. You might even want to compare the emissions in live performances in the past and the present—it starts to look like an almost endless enquiry.
The overriding point is that the price consumers are willing to pay for listening to recorded music has never been lower, yet the hidden environmental impact of that experience is enormous. Are streaming platforms the right business model to facilitate music delivery? Is streaming music remotely from the cloud the most appropriate way to listen to music from the perspective of environmental sustainability?
Unfortunately, more questions than answers.
What’s the difference between a musician and a large pizza? A pizza can feed a family of four