Vinyl isn’t massively more wasteful than streaming per unit, altho it depends on how long the vinyl will exist and how many times it’s played. Per play I think streaming becomes more wasteful than CD or vinyl after around 20 plays. Downloading MP3’s is the greenest form of music consumption, streaming isn’t really a big improvement over physical media. Streaming has also increased the consumption of music a lot, which means we consume music a lot more than in the times of physical media and radio. This means more emissions, naturally.
Thus vinyl isn’t “just” a useless trophy item for wasteful middle class people with too much income, but still a relevant and pretty good format for music. Especially considering it stays playable for decades, even a hundred years, which a lot more than any other way to archive material.
So, making it greener is a good thing and definitely worth the effort.
Thus vinyl isn’t “just” a useless trophy item for wasteful middle class people with too much income, but still a relevant and pretty good format for music. Especially considering it stays playable for decades, even a hundred years, which a lot more than any other way to archive material.
Now convince the masses into thinking that way and I’ll believe you.
What masses? Do you mean people who don’t care about owning music? I don’t think they’ve been buying vinyl in three decades now. Some people just consume music and appreciate ease of use and low cost. It’s much like food.
But do you get what I wanted to say? It’s a bit like saying let’s make avocados “greener”. The only way to act “green” with avocados is not to eat them at all and eat you grandmas’ garden cabbage instead. That’s why I wrote all these messages.
I suppose we could just focus on the cabbage that everybody eats and make it as good, green and sustainable as possible.
No, I don’t because it was based on false premises and that analogy sucks. Sorry, I’ve seen people here say similar things before and they never have a clear picture of what the actual relationship between different formats regarding emissions is.
And also attacking the vinyl industry as just wasteful and useless is intellectually dishonest, as vinyl does actually have many upsides that other formats don’t have. If you want to cut emissions and the enviromental impact of plastics, start from plastic bags and single use packaging. That’s what would matter. Phasing out vinyl entirely would make no impact on the big picture.
Yes, you can compare the enviromental effect. You know those servers don’t run on magic? Streaming takes a lot of energy, and that energy is still mostly produced with fossil fuels.
You can calculate an exact value of energy consumption for streaming on a per play basis.
Then there’s naturally the aspect that’s much harder to calculate but is a huge issue: you need a device to stream that music. The pace at which we update our smartphones is ridiculous and hugely wasteful. Like, a good stereo system will last in use for decades.
There’s so many different factors involved that I don’t think you can be objective. From locations of servers to particular devices used by the end users. Feels like a very abstract picture to be honest.
This has been calculated by scientists. I googled respectable sources and exact numbers in the last thread, but don’t feel like doing it again. Search for it on the forum and read the discussion.
I just want to point out that streaming is far from green. If you set foot in one of the datacenters that Spotify uses for 5 minutes, it will be totally clear.
These datacenters use a ridiculous amount of power to keep servers running, and then on top of that, they have to use another ridiculous amount of power to cool these servers. All of the energy (heat) that comes off the servers as a side effect is totally wasted and I’m yet to see a system that allows reclaiming some of that.
Where do we think this energy that powers datacenters comes from? Solar? Wind? Hahaha… Maybe 10% is green energy? I don’t know the number, but it’s likely very low.
By the way, the same thing could be said about Microsoft’s or Google’s or Facebook’s datacenters. It’s also wasteful to use energy to power insane amounts of storage of photos of people’s cats on Instagram. It just is and we’ve accepted this as an appropriate use of seriously advanced technology. Humans fucking suck.
No, but I don’t trust claims like this on popular media, because they usually reflect some bonkers claim from some research group because it’s controversial and generates public attention.
I don’t doubt that hosting your app on AWS generates a lot of thermal excess and waste via external factors, but I don’t think we can measure that anywhere near correctly.
The reality that we indeed know is that vinyl production generates a lot of pollution due to it’s nature of being a plastic thing, that’s made from extraction of nature’s resources, dangerous chemicals and is usually transported across continents just so you can collect that missing piece of some obscure band’s discography.
You do realize that each album pressed, wrapped, shipped isnt exact in its usage of materials for its creation. There is lots of waste. Along with that, albums don’t just appear in your hands. The shipping uses fuel. And there are several shipping stages.
MP3 has FAR less waste. Unfortunately it requires the internet, which I personally hate. So with that…no more music for me.
