The Hum #11 - Perspectives on Streaming
The rise of music streaming and its climate impact
In this issue we finish our history of portable audio series and provide a perspective on the sustainability of streaming.
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Tracing the history of portable audio
The Era of Endless Choice: How Streaming Revolutionized Music
Our story of portable audio concludes with the story of our current format: streaming. As we explored in the last entry to this series, the iPod and iTunes store offered music lovers access to vast personal libraries, setting the stage for streaming to open the door to a seemingly infinite ocean of music.
The seeds of streaming were sown with the rise of early internet radio services during the mid to late 90s and the decline of physical formats like CDs. The Napster era, despite it’s issues, highlighted the desire for on-demand music access. With the release of the iPhone, and its app store, it was just a matter of time before music services and apps entered the fray.
Streaming services needed three key ingredients to get off the ground:
High-speed internet on the go: Dial-up connections wouldn't do. The widespread adoption of smartphones with 3G wireless internet by the late 200s provided the necessary speed and platform for streaming music apps.
Digital Audio Formats: MP3s, though often criticized for compressed quality, offered a practical way to store and transfer large amounts of music digitally. Lossless formats like FLAC and ALAC later emerged for audiophiles seeking the highest quality.
Shifting consumer habits: The iPod offered a personal library, but the concept of "ownership" began to shift. Consumers were drawn to the convenience and affordability of accessing millions of songs on-demand for monthly subscriptions, rather than purchasing, managing, and storing their own libraries.
The birth of true music streaming is generally attributed to a Swedish startup called Spotify, founded in 2006 and launched in 2008 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. Spotify wasn't alone. Competitors like Pandora and Rhapsody offered similar services, but Spotify's freemium approach proved to be a masterstroke. It attracted millions of users who were tired of illegal downloads and the limitations of traditional radio. Spotify's intuitive interface and vast music library further fueled its popularity, with many users converting into their paid subscription.
By the late 2010s, Spotify had emerged as the world's leading music streaming service. This dominance wasn't just about having the most songs. Spotify had cultivated a loyal user base through its intuitive design, and focus on music discovery. It became the go-to platform for millions to explore new music, listen to old favorites, and share their musical journeys with friends.
While considerable challenges remain, namely ensuring fair artist compensation in the age of streaming, Spotify's impact is undeniable. It has transformed how we access and enjoy music, ushering in an era of abundance where a world of music is literally at our fingertips.
Streaming's impact on the music industry has been profound:
Convenience: Listeners today have near-immediate access to libraries of music so vast that some estimate it would take 30 years to listen to all the music uploaded to Spotify in a single day.
Artist-Fan Connection: Streaming platforms allow artists to connect directly with fans, sharing music, updates, and concert tours.
Increased revenues for the industry but reduced revenues for independent acts: While streaming continues to grow the music industry’s total revenues, smaller and independent artists struggle to make any reasonable income from this format.
The future of streaming is constantly evolving. High-resolution audio options cater to audiophiles, while integration with smart speakers and voice assistants makes music even more accessible. Updates to streaming platform models are also underway, although they are unlikely to significantly impact the income smaller musician’s make from them any time soon.
Streaming may not be perfect, with debates about artist compensation and platform dominance ongoing. But one thing is certain: streaming has fundamentally changed how we discover, listen to, and share music. It's an era of endless choice, with millions of songs quite literally at our fingertips.
The Sustainability of Streaming
Before streaming, you (or your parents) might have had a handful of CDs in your car, some mixtapes in the garage, or a record collection that made packing and moving cumbersome. But just because digital streaming platforms like Spotify have made music invisibly integrated with smartphones doesn’t hide the fact that streaming has a material impact on the environment. In fact, its immediacy and invisibility contribute to an accelerated consumption of energy.
Calculating the carbon footprint of streaming isn’t as straightforward as physical media. Digital audio files are accessed from energy and water consuming cloud data servers via energy consuming networks and routers, running on devices which also use energy. Electricity sources vary by state, with over 50% of electricity coming from fossil fuels as of January 2022. According to the New Statesman, an hour of media streaming is roughly 55 grams of CO2 equivalent, whereas CDs are more than three times that, and vinyl and cassettes over 2 kilograms of CO2 a unit. Despite that number appearing low, the article purports that streaming Olivia Rodrigo’s single “Drivers License” for a little under a year outweighs the emissions of flying from London to New York and back 4,000 times, or the annual emissions of 500 people in the UK.
Currently, few DSPs provide insight into how they quantify and counter their carbon footprint. Spotify’s Climate Action site breaks down their Scope 1 (emissions that an organization controls or owns directly), Scope 2 (indirect emissions from where energy is purchased or used), and Scope 3 (emissions not produced by the organization itself but from its value chain) emissions. Spotify measured over 98% of their 275,535 metric tons CO2e emissions as Scope 3. However, this is not surprising, as a work-from-anywhere company the energy use of their employees is not associated with any company-owned buildings or infrastructure. Secondly, they are not producing devices or providing internet services which people use to stream music.
Other DSPs like Tidal and Bandcamp don’t provide any information on their sites, although Tidal has partnerships we will discuss later on. Apple’s carbon reduction program is focused on emissions from their hardware with no mention of how they tackle Apple Music or streaming emissions. Labels like Warner Music Group (WMG), which own the music that DSPs license, have little to no focus on the impact of streaming in their ESG reports. WMG’s 2023 report focuses on the financial sustainability of streaming for artists and instead devotes a section to sustainability programs for physical media such as vinyl and CDs, which represent only 8.4% of their revenue.
You might wonder, what can be done to reduce emissions without stopping streaming altogether?
On the industry level, quantifying carbon emissions of an organization’s value chain and between value chains is key to having a better understanding of where to focus and collaborate. The not for profit Greening of Streaming, aims to foster collaboration through the supply chain to find solutions for end to end efficiency of streaming services. They leverage their organizational members (note that none of which belong to large DSPs, music labels, etc.) to run hackathons about how they might measure emissions, as well as hold webinars among industry leaders about accountability.
On the technology level, streaming must consider energy as well as digital files. The creation and operation of sustainable data centers is a huge consideration as AI becomes a focus of heavy energy use, and a handful of tech companies are investing in renewable energy. Music files themselves can also be made more energy efficient. A small UK-based technology company, MQA, reduces an audio file’s carbon footprint roughly 80% through encoding audio at a higher sampling rate and optimizing the file’s data capacity. MQA has partnered with Tidal to provide MQA-encoded files, however availability of listening to MQA depends on the artist, label, or distributor.
On the user level, downloading music to listen to offline reduces the energy needed to power and cool servers when streaming music over WiFi. According to Rolling Stone, downloading music offline can reduce energy emissions up to 80% after the first listen. Additionally, if you are going to stream, consider how long you’re streaming for. Just as Netflix asks if you’re still watching, think about if you’re actively listening and the energy used to do so.