Is Streaming Music Worse For the Environment? (newyorker.com) 63
"The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music's previous eras," argues Kyle Devine, in his recent book, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music."
The New Yorker's music critic writes: He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions — some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000... Exploitative regimes of labor enable the production of smartphone and computer components. Conditions at Foxconn factories in China have long been notorious; recent reports suggest that the brutally abused Uighur minority has been pressed into the production of Apple devices. Child laborers are involved in the mining of cobalt, which is used in iPhone batteries. Spotify, the dominant streaming service, needs huge quantities of energy to power its servers. No less problematic are the streaming services' own exploitative practices, including their notoriously stingy royalty payments to working musicians...
When the compact disk entered circulation, in the nineteen-eighties, audio snobs attacked it as a degradation of listening culture — a descent from soulful analog sound to soulless digital. In environmental terms, however, the CD turned out to be somewhat less deleterious [than vinyl records]. Devine observes that polycarbonate, the medium's principal ingredient, is not as toxic as polyvinyl chloride. Early on, the widespread use of polystyrene for CD packaging wiped out that advantage, but a turn toward recyclable materials in recent years has made the lowly CD perhaps the least environmentally harmful format on the market.
In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: "The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like." This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless. In much the same way, it has convinced us not to think too hard about the regime of mass surveillance on which the economics of the industry rests.... At the end of "Decomposed," Devine incorporates his ecology of music into a more comprehensive vision of anthropogenic crisis. "Musically, we may need to question our expectations of infinite access and infinite storage," he writes. Our demand that all of musical history should be available at the touch of a finger has become gluttonous. It may seem a harmless form of consumer desire, but it leaves real scars on the face of the Earth.
The New Yorker's music critic writes: He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions — some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000... Exploitative regimes of labor enable the production of smartphone and computer components. Conditions at Foxconn factories in China have long been notorious; recent reports suggest that the brutally abused Uighur minority has been pressed into the production of Apple devices. Child laborers are involved in the mining of cobalt, which is used in iPhone batteries. Spotify, the dominant streaming service, needs huge quantities of energy to power its servers. No less problematic are the streaming services' own exploitative practices, including their notoriously stingy royalty payments to working musicians...
When the compact disk entered circulation, in the nineteen-eighties, audio snobs attacked it as a degradation of listening culture — a descent from soulful analog sound to soulless digital. In environmental terms, however, the CD turned out to be somewhat less deleterious [than vinyl records]. Devine observes that polycarbonate, the medium's principal ingredient, is not as toxic as polyvinyl chloride. Early on, the widespread use of polystyrene for CD packaging wiped out that advantage, but a turn toward recyclable materials in recent years has made the lowly CD perhaps the least environmentally harmful format on the market.
In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: "The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like." This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless. In much the same way, it has convinced us not to think too hard about the regime of mass surveillance on which the economics of the industry rests.... At the end of "Decomposed," Devine incorporates his ecology of music into a more comprehensive vision of anthropogenic crisis. "Musically, we may need to question our expectations of infinite access and infinite storage," he writes. Our demand that all of musical history should be available at the touch of a finger has become gluttonous. It may seem a harmless form of consumer desire, but it leaves real scars on the face of the Earth.
Yes (Score:2)
Even if it's a violation of Betteridge's law :-)
Just like Radio.
When I listen to a record of mine, there's just 1 electric gizmo running, not another BIG one hundred miles away as with streaming and radio.
It's just a way to control us and milk us dry or burn our ears with ads.
Your music taste gets defined in your teens.
If you download the whole decade of music dating from when you were a teen (illegally of course, get a VPN for day if you haven't got one), you'll need about 15 minutes with a semi-decent con
Hypothetically speaking: No need for a VPN (Score:2)
(illegally of course, get a VPN for day if you haven't got one)
Hypothetically speaking, youtube-dl exploits a grey area in the law. YouTube has the rights to distribute music via their licensing deals and you can just plug in playlists for the software to download loads of tracks at once. There's no difference in terms of adblocking and using this method in terms of industry profits, except that YouTube loses less money through you not using as much of their server bandwidth in the end - so feel free to have at it.
Hypothetically, you could use a GUI frontend for you
Re: (Score:2)
That is not any grey area, it is making a copy for personal use, using the same system that would give you a copy for personal use if you clicked youtube's "play" button.
Re: Hypothetically speaking: No need for a VPN (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. Thanks for reading it. That's even further off topic than I would have imagined.
Re: Hypothetically speaking: No need for a VPN (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. Thanks for reading it. That's even further off topic than I would have imagined.
Honestly, even the title was a dead giveaway for me. If a title asks if something that required manufacturing and physical distribution is worse for the environment than something whose replacement is done via the internet and requires neither of those things, the answer is going to be 'probably not'.
Here, we have a very selective set of data.
iPhone production counts against the cost of streaming music, but there's no mention in the article about the environmental impact of CD player production (or turntable production, or any of the other physical formats). While some of those things were likely manufactured in Japan (who still did lots of their own manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s and had better labor laws), I'd argue that as bad as iPhone production is, the Walkman and its knockoffs in the late 90s were probably made in even worse conditions, as there was less awareness and pressure to even marginally improve things.
Batteries count against streaming services in the article because the iPhones have them, but that one made me laugh. Anyone who was alive in the 90's and owned a Discman remembers buying AA batteries by the palette, because they lasted *maybe* six hours if you got the high-octane Duracell ones. Assume 2 hours of listening a day, two pairs a week, 78 pairs in the 18-month average smartphone battery life, and...suddenly his point vanishes. Smartphone batteries may be terrible for the environment, but alkaline batteries weren't exactly environmentally friendly at the quantities they were being used.
But let's compare it to the home audio stuff! My Technics 1200MK2 takes about 14W to play a record, which seems similar to a smartphone, Bluetooth speaker, and a router. Sounds like a lateral move, but that doesn't include an amplifier. Add 30-100 watts to be able to actually hear a record, and suddenly the new stuff comes out on top.
Honorable mention for datacenters doing a whole lot more than streaming music, phones doing a whole lot more than streaming music, and I'm sure three or four other crappy things that I can't be bothered to look back at the article to cite because I've already made my point.
This article is why we can't have nice things. Even if the book has better balance, the article makes it sound very misleading and disingenuous. I, personally, think we *should* be looking at ways to reduce carbon emissions, improve efficiency, and limit consumption...but when publications like The New Yorker run articles that make statements that only work if you throw out the data that doesn't fit the claim, it makes the real research and hard data that much more buried in the noise, and confirms those who believe that AGW isn't a big deal because *obviously* there is less environmental impact to having 1,000 people stream an album using phones they already have, when contrasted to shipping a palette of CDs across the country on a tractor trailer...but The New Yorker is claiming we should go back to buying CDs to lower our carbon footprint, which is not only ridiculous, but fuel for their next article "we shouldn't be buying physical things in stores because that's how Coronavirus spreads"...
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KabaMinang (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Japan still does a lot of manufacturing. Crack open a high end Roland drum machine, they're crazy impressive. They use quad coupled inductors just on the DC input! Sure, the portable guitar amplifier is made in China now. Who cares? It is just 1 IC, some IO, and a box.
Add 30-100 watts to be able to actually hear a record, and suddenly the new stuff comes out on top.
Well, no, not even close, but the record player will likely waste that much in other places. If you were using 30 watts of amplification in normal listening... well, you can't hear anymore anyway! lol
This article is why we can't have nice things.
Meh. Not sure how anything mentioned has s
Re: (Score:2)
Streaming is only worse if you narrowly define it as the energy consumed, and not the entire manufacturing and shipping process.
If you include everything, the cost to produce and operate servers likely is not different from a factory to produce CD's or LP's. What is more expensive is the ongoing energy costs for the non-consumption of music. How much energy is wasted in maintaining multiple digital audio libraries and hardware rather than just downloading one library with everything you could possibly want
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Here is the reality beneath, forget the lies being pushed by a PR=B$ firm. Streaming enormously reduces green house gases because it does one specific thing, IT BLOCKS ADVERTISING (which is why the advertising psychopaths continually attack it). They pay for psychologically manipulative advertising because it works it sell more junk, generates more planet and burns our planet alive and us with it. Less advertising and people's ego's are less targeted, the purposefully psychological manipulation to make them
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That's just you, man.
When I was a kid I loved sweet schlager pop.
When I was in my teens, I was a long-haired headbanging rocker.
In my '20s I got into hip-hop, house and gabber techno.
In my early '30s, I got into synthpop: both new bands, and old bands even so old that I had never heard them in my childhood.
And recently in my early '40s I started to listen to J-pop.
It is not so much that my taste has changed as that it has widened.
There is always music to discover
Re: (Score:2)
Your next logical step should be Vocaloid. It's not a music style in itself but you may find the different vocals interesting, especially when Miku is able to sing a chorus "by herself".
Start with the older songs and progress your way up through the years. Most composers have their own styles and after a while you'll even be able to recognize some of them after only a minute of listening to a new song.
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Your music taste gets defined in your teens...
I like the rest of your comment, but to this part I say "No, thank you". There's some music that I listened to back then that I can no longer tolerate, and there's a huge amount that I've grown to love in the last 40 years that I wouldn't have spent 5 seconds on back then. Kate Bush, Tom Waits, Muse, FSOL, Arctic Monkeys, Eminem, Imelda May, Green Day - I could go on and on through 1.3TiB of music naming artists whose music I wouldn't have liked even 10 years ago, never mind 40. So no - my musical taste was
Re: Yes (Score:2)
"Your music taste gets defined in your teens"
Maybe yours did, but I no longer like the music I listened to as a teen (90s alt rock). Very little of what I listen to now bears a resemblance to that music, in either style or tone.
I agree on your main point though, which is to download the music and not stream it. Environmentally, pirating music is more ethical than buying it on a physical format or paying for a streaming service.
I run an Airsonic server at home that plays all my locally-stored music, and I do
Yes (Score:1)
The most ecological solution is to make one's own music.
If one can't, then it's probably downloading the music and listening to it offline.
I wonder about the ecological footprint of the various ways of downloading: has P2P a higher footprint than downloading from a regular server? Would a 100% distributed internet, as opposed to the highly centralized internet of today, be more or less energy-demanding?
LimeWire was less energy demanding (Score:2)
has P2P a higher footprint than downloading from a regular server?
When LimeWire (now WireShare) was most popular, people would share what they had while they were doing other things with their computers. When they were not using their PCs, they would be switched off. This means that folks were donating what would otherwise be partially-wasted electricity towards distributing content other people definitely wanted. People would then permanently store those songs, to then be distributed to others who wanted them. That's less wasteful than any centralised server model would
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Not sure this is true. My Grandmother used to complain that playing the violin was very hard work and tiring, and required her to live of a very high calorie diet of roast beef, roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, with a desert of cream cakes.
I expect a lot of the environment was damaged by her diet.
As opposed to... (Score:5, Insightful)
Driving an hour to the store to buy an album like we used to back in the day
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed, they left out most of the externalities for The Old Way.
They also ignore that electrical generation isn't the same everywhere; nor is download frequency.
The dirtiest electricity is also the most expensive, and is mostly used for industry. Places where it is used for residential power are less likely to have high levels of internet use. You can't just say, "it takes n kW per song, and electricity produces m CO2 per kW" and be describing what happened.
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An hour? Do you live in the-middle-of-nowhere Utah? The closest store to me by car is 10 minutes. Always has been. 12 if I hit the lights wrong. Before that, I could ride my bike up to a store (which no longer exists) in the same amount of time.
Also, once you are at the store (i.e. a mall), you could go to different stores to see who had the better price and selection at no additional environmental cost.
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You'd think so, but the more you move the more you require energy and the more you eat. Everything has an environmental cost.
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No one drives an hour to a store to buy an album. No one ever did either. Plenty of people drove an hour to get to a city and do a whole load of activities throughout a day which may have included buying an album at a store, but that's about it.
Now that Amazon delivery of a Silver Chair LP I received last week...
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that way is quite antiquated...
Modern cities have working public transit systems, where the environmental impact gets divided by more passengers, thus being better for the environment.
One argument I often hear from Americans against it is that public transit systems would be unsafe. Well, they are not considered unsafe in most of Western Europe or in big Asian metropolises.
Making the public transit system safe or not is a choice by your policymakers. If they are not safe where you live, then you shoul
Re: (Score:2)
But worse than downloading the track once and playing it from local storage. Less convenient though.
Be at peace, if you choose to (Score:2)
If you're not a religious environmentalist, your music streaming isn't a sin.
Convenience (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
No (Score:2)
The longer a streaming technology is used, the more local caching it has. This effect will become more pronounced over time, as technology continues improving, but our eyes and ears retain their original resolution.
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The longer a streaming technology is used, the more local caching it has. This effect will become more pronounced over time, as technology continues improving, but our eyes and ears retain their original resolution.
Are you suggesting that I'll hear a 16kbit/sec audio stream of a song some day, but I'll hear it as full quality because I already know the song?
Of course. (Score:2)
From an energy efficiency point of view it takes several times more electricity to stream data than to access it locally. This isn't even a debate, it's just a fact and an obvious one at that. It's like asking if drinking bottled water is worse for the environment than drinking tap water because the answer is obvious.
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This isn't even a debate, it's just a fact and an obvious one at that. It's like asking if drinking bottled water is worse for the environment than drinking tap water because the answer is obvious.
Yeah, sure, if you cherry pick the post obvious factors, you don't even need to make a list of what the others ones would be.
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From an energy efficiency point of view it takes several times more electricity to stream data than to access it locally.
Are you accounting for the energy it takes to make the vinyl for the vinyl record? For the energy to ship it to the store, and the energy for you to go to the store to buy it?
No, didn't think so.
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"it takes several times more electricity to stream data than to access it locally."
I'm pretty sure he as referring to accessing data locally, i.e. an mp3/aac file on your computer/etc instead of streaming it.
Fuck youtube. (Score:1, Flamebait)
If streaming 192kb audio is contributing to the global warming issue the stop paying these Youtube fucktards $1MILLION a month to create hours of brain-dead, unthining, 4k video of them playing Minecraft so they can spank it to HC porn in mommies basement. If you are going to get butthurt over music, you better be ready to arm up and boot up over video, assholes.
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If streaming 192kb audio is contributing to the global warming issue the stop paying these Youtube fucktards $1MILLION a month to create hours of brain-dead, unthining, 4k video of them playing Minecraft so they can spank it to HC porn in mommies basement. If you are going to get butthurt over music, you better be ready to arm up and boot up over video, assholes.
If people weren't watching those streams (which I too have no understanding of why anyone would watch them), wouldn't they instead just watch something else, also streamed at the same resolution and bitrate? For example, ESPN or whatever sports people watch.
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If you have no understanding of why people are watching those streams, it's because you haven't found the proper streams yet. I'm guessing that for 99% of people, 99% of YouTube is not worth watching. But that's the beauty of YouTube, otherwise you get what cable TV has become: 99% reality shows, 99% of the time. The remaining 1% is government-sponsored news to keep us all afraid and stressed.
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It's no different than the people (many on here) who whine about Amazon and its policies yet merrily order stuff from them every other day.
As I have said before, if you're that upset at a company, for whatever reason, stop using them. It's that simple.
Don't want to contribute (as much) to environmental damage? Don't stream. Don't want to contribute to Amazon's policies? Don't buy from them.
Just like Electric Cars (Score:1)
This is just like electric cars which merely displace the production of noxious substances to somewhere "far away" to make the left-tards feel all virtuous.
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And when the production is all centralized to a few spots, process improvements to that someplace far away decrease generation of all those substances *simultaneously*, for all of those cars:
It is estimated that 50% of the smog in the state of California is produced by motor vehicles. Gross Polluters represent only approximately 10 to 15 percent of all these vehicles, however they are estimated to be responsible for more than half of all vehicle smog emissions.
Re: (Score:2)
Except you neglected to mention that electric cars have 3x the efficiency of an ICE car (95~99% of onboard stored energy turned into kinetic energy vs. around 33% for a really good ICE vehicle), and their "fuel" is delivered from a power plant of whatever type over wires, instead of being pulled out of the ground with diesel generators, sent halfway across the world in a superpolluting supertanker, refined with immense amounts of heat, and hauled in big tanks to gas stations on trains and then trucks, with
It's a lot better than a live show (Score:3)
Streaming music is a lot more environmentally friendly than going to a live show. I'm pretty sure the plague had a positive impact on music related carbon emissions.
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Streaming music has no offset live music. It may have offset CD sales, but if anything Streaming music would be just yet another additional carbon emission.
The CD and the Damage Done (Score:2)
Every time I hear about "audio snobs" and digital music, I think of a little essay Neil Young wrote. Yeah, the guy who came up with one of the most overpriced digital music devices ever. I sort of wanted a Pono...not enough to pay for one though.
The CD and the Damage Done [harpers.org]
"Listening to a CD is like looking through a screen window."
"...from the early 1980s up till now [1992], and probably for another ten or fifteen years to come --- this is the darkest time ever for recorded music."
1992? Isn't that when Ne
Re: (Score:2)
Every time I hear about "audio snobs" and digital music, I think of a little essay Neil Young wrote. Yeah, the guy who came up with one of the most overpriced digital music devices ever. I sort of wanted a Pono...not enough to pay for one though.
The CD and the Damage Done [harpers.org]
"Listening to a CD is like looking through a screen window."
Yeah, I remember when CDs were newish (like IDK 1984 or so) and the big deal was how much better it sounded than pops and scratches or tape hiss.
The damage the CD did was to make music sound better for 99% of the population.
Was it the best thing ever? Of course not. Was it way better than what we had? Of course it was.
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When they first came out, there were a few releases that made use of the full dynamic range that CDs had to offer. Then they started putting the back catalogue on CD, and lazily used the same masters that had been compressed so as not to stress the cost-optimized vinyl format that was prevalent. This became the norm, and later the increased the compression even more to ramp up the "loudness" to sound "better" on cheap Bluetooth and mobile phone speakers. All this has nothing to do with the technical capab
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That is the funniest opening I've ever read. Not so much because he's got no idea about CDs, but because he has no idea about screen windows. Postulating that each square can only be one colour and then saying it looks better when you get up really close to the screen...
I hope his follow up album was pixel art and this editorial was just a high-IQ marketing campaign.
YES YES YES (Score:2)
I screws over musicians and songwriters. Record companies and publishing companies lease their entire catalogs of music the artist that do get tracked are paid thousandths of a cent per play. So it's killing the creative environment of musicians and songwriters.
You have an artist you really like buy their work and preferably directly from them when you can.
Re: (Score:2)
I screws over musicians and songwriters.
So stop doing that!
Record companies and publishing companies lease their entire catalogs of music the artist that do get tracked are paid thousandths of a cent per play. So it's killing the creative environment of musicians and songwriters.
You have an artist you really like buy their work and preferably directly from them when you can.
Speaking of YES, I already have all their albums, even the ones remastered by Steven Wilson.
But anyway, I'm not likely to give any more money to musicians now that I'm old. I hate modern music and I already own almost everything I like.
It's a shame really, because I'd love to like some new things, but I guess I'm just old and it all sounds like garbage to me.
Re: (Score:2)
You blamed everybody but the predatory record and publishing companies, who are the root of the problem. Amazing.
Sensationalist garbage (Score:2)
Conditions at Foxconn factories in China have long been notorious
Oh? The suicides that we’re famously reported were actually happening at something like 1/2 to 1/4 the national rate, so that was bupkis. The overtime that was widely reported? Isolated incidents that weren’t happening on a widespread basis according to independent audits.
recent reports suggest that the brutally abused Uighur minority has been pressed into the production of Apple devices.
Discredited reports. While Uighur people are being pressed into service, and that is a very serious issue, it’s happened at factories unrelated to Apple device production. The only tie to Apple is that they also happened
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We’re -> were
Autocorrect fail that I didn’t notice in time.
It is worse for art. And for everyone's pocket. (Score:3)
And a delusion anyway. /forget/. There's also no deleting, let alone moving. Just overwriting pointers and "used" markers, and copying.
There is no streaming. Its just a low-latency download. That's it. For some weird reason, everyone instructs his computer, to execute commands from the sender, that say to forget where it was saved to and mark the memory as free right afterwards. Which nobody has an obligation to.
Yes,
That it is basically an art apocalypse, can be seen when looking at that time in history, where the UK already had distributors' privilege ("copyright"), but Germany did not.
Art flourished in Germany. And was stifled in the UK, up to
them now having a information dark age for that time. While Germany became known as the "country of poets and thinkers" back then.
But even anyone who looks at today's nth prequel sequel remakes of the same re-hashed"i.p.", and how all of the media industry releases have turned to shit, will already perfectly aware of that. Or anyone who saw his favorite fan productions die. How many more Mario games do your want? How many other ideas to not see the light of day?
I say art and business are mutually exclusive. Either you do it to touch people and transport an insight that changes how they see the world ... /or/ you maximize the target group and the amount you can milk from them with the least possible effort.
The biggest enemy of an artist "industry" is its art industry. E.g. the biggest enemy of the musician industry is the music industry. That's been known at least since Payola. But probably since the first sheet music distributors.
Ask any musician: Their income is mostly concerts, and some merchandising. The "selling"* of music is pretty much negligible.
(* The license agrements themselves imply music cannot be sold, sine it is not a good, and hence what is sold is a license, which is a limited access right to a secret, as long as you tell nobody. Which is obviously unenforceable. I myself showed that it is even physically impossible to enforce, unless you break the speed of light or other related law of physics.)
Fatal flaw (Score:2)
We're going to have gadgets and internet anyway.
If we do anything, it should be to make the code running on these devices more efficient so we can use them for decades.
For the last thirty years, most of my upgrades have been for technological reasons, not the device dying. You can read an ebook on an IBM XT.
As far as music goes, since I favor a genre that is still distributed mostly on CD, LP, and MC, not much has changed. Being able to preview the music online has helped me avoid some real turds though.
I n
Just get a massive pack of mod/xm files. (Score:2)
And by massive i mean 100MB or something. That will give you thousands over thousands of songs to listen to, and they're probably less CPU intensive than MP3/OGG.
Bad engineering (Score:3)
This is largely just bad engineering and product design. Many people pull up youtube with music videos to listen to music; the heavy part of that transfer is the video, not the audio. Youtube should not enable this sort of behavior; it should require interaction to play music videos.
There's also nothing stopping spotify from caching music locally or predictably and downloading it during off-peak hours. There's also nothing preventing spotify clients from discovering each other on a LAN to distribute content locally (although there are theoretically some privacy concerns there). If it's the same account, then the privacy concerns are moot. In the case of spotify, apple music, etc, it's just lazy irresponsible developers/management.
No (Score:2)
A cd case weighs 100 grams. A hundred forty thousand CDs can fit in a standard container. Math math math to get a standard CD just shipped across the ocean takes 3 kilijoules. Not making it,not selling it, not getting it
Re: (Score:2)
no. you fucking twat. (Score:2)
CD/Vinyl:
transportation (shipping) container ship, semi, whatever to every shopping mall in the entire world.
transportation (consumer) bus,train, subway, car whatever for hundreds of millions of consumers around the entire world
manufacturing: who cares. this is such a small number in the grand scheme of things
steaming:
uhhh, a data center, somewhere. even if it were fueled by dead baby seals, it would still be less of an impact on the environment. And power, a laptop and/or smart phone spending a few CPU cy
Environmental cost of smartphone and computers? (Score:1)
Ultimately, yes (Score:2)
It takes more resources to stream a music file compared to reading it from a local file
unless pulling 1-100 MB off of a local drive and into ram somehow takes less resources than pulling it off of the internet, which - educated guesstimate - is highly unlikely
Indirectly (Score:2)
because JS is worse for the environment. Inefficient software increases resource requirements which increases power draw and heat generation while also increasing load on the power grid. Individually it doesn't matter but adding up the extra power and heat from all the devices across the world its likely to be considerable.
Software bloat in general contributes to this. A lot of seemingly simple applications that have existed for years have ballooned in their memory, storage and compute requirements for appa