As Spotify moves to video, the environmental footprint of music streaming hits the high notes

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  European average carbon footprint for video streaming as producing 55g of CO₂e per hour. This CO₂e or carbon dioxide equivalent is a comparable measure of the potential effect of different greenhouse gases on the climate: 55g of CO₂e is 50 times more than audio streaming and the equivalent of microwaving four bags of popcorn

  What the fuck is this article? This is not helpful in any way. Yeah du-doy the thing that uses electricity “creates” carbon. How bout we remove fossil fuels from the grid then?

  1.1g per hour is ridiculously efficient. An average meal in the Western world is ~3Kg.

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  • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    55g of CO₂e is 50 times more than audio streaming and the equivalent of microwaving four bags of popcorn

    How much is that in football fields?

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    • P1nkman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      0.54% of a foosball table. Or 0.00000000000000042% of the length of two average elephants.

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  • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s one of my pet peeves, when people use relative comparisons to overstate things that have very small absolute differences.

    55g of CO2 is basically nothing. A gallon of gasoline represents about 2400g of CO2 emissions when burned. So for a typical vehicle that gets 30 miles per gallon, 55g of CO2 is basically the equivalent of driving 0.6875 miles (1.1km).

    It’s less than the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee (60g).

    Or, alternatively, eating a single quarter pound hamburger would be about 3 kg of CO2, or 55 hours of video viewing at this rate.

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  • P1nkman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s to put the blame on the consumer. Fuck these cooperate overlords. I’m hungry, when do we eat?

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’ll keep streaming and just eat less popcorn. I’ve been needing to cut back. I blow a kiss to the sky. I got your back, Mother Earth. I always check the resin identification codes before I recycle plastics, too.

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• antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  To minimise the environmental footprint of your own music streaming, use Wi-Fi rather than 4G or 5G. If you listen to a song repeatedly, purchase a download to play. Use localised storage rather than cloud-based systems for all of your music and video files. Reduce auto-play, aimless background streaming or using streaming as a sleep aid by changing the default settings on your device including reducing streaming resolution. And turn your camera off for video calls, as carbon emissions are 25 times more than for audio only.

  Lol no I won’t.

  What a stupid, bizarre and illogical article. It clearly shows that the key is in moving to renewables yet it still argues for the users also doing this sort of tiny useless gestures. I suspect it’s AI-written at least in part.

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The devices they’re talking about are also still turned on. The power usage of the network requests is incredibly small. Switching from cellular to wifi will make the biggest difference, but who the hell isn’t already on their home wifi network? Plus, at least me personally, I have my liked songs downloaded on Spotify to save data usage. I suspect others may as well.

    This is like the folks worrying about the water usage of AI. Environmental concerns are a real problem and there are tons of things to focus on, but they pick such a weirdly specific, negligible, non-issue.

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  • InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Use localised storage rather than cloud-based systems for all of your music and video files

    This is good advice tho. I also chose to read it as a Spotify endorsement of the high seas ;)

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  • mang0@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You do realize that it’s harder to move to renewables if the energy required keeps increasing? Higher bandwidth usage requires expansion of internet infrastructure to account for peak usage which increases the amount of energy used, not only for the manufactured hardware (which will likely turn to e-waste at some point) but also to keep the infrastructure running. I highly recommend reading research about the sustainability of the internet.

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    • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No, since the article doesn’t mention anything of that sort. I really, really doubt that in the world of crypto mining and AI training the average people streaming some music and music videos will make a substantial difference. Your degrowth-oriented approach sounds like it would just solidify the already highly monopolised market, as any new players or innovation can be met with the “wastes too much bandwidth” hammer, as is this new service by Spotify right here.

      I highly recommend reading research about the sustainability of the internet.

      This is the first article that I get on Google. Now, as they say, “I ain’t reading all that” (I probably wouldn’t understand most of it), but I did take a look at the abstract:

      Decarbonising electricity would substantially mitigate the climate impacts linked to Internet consumption, while the use of mineral and metal resources would remain of concern. A synergistic combination of rapid decarbonisation and additional measures aimed at reducing the use of fresh raw materials in electronic devices (e.g., lifetime extension) is paramount to prevent the growing Internet demand from exacerbating the pressure on the finite Earth’s carrying capacity.

      Sounds good to me! With no mention of having to limit our internet usage.

      And if reducing bandwidth waste really were that important, it would have go both ways anyway, with the providers optimising their content (probably forced to do so by regulations in some way).

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• nivenkos@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  And carting CDs and vinyl around used a lot more energy still.

  We should focus on increasing renewable energy production, not degrowth.

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  • ChickenAndRice@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    …we can do both…

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• paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  These companies will use the lowest possible bitrate with the newest possible codecs to balance quality and bandwidth. They will also default to a medium quality when it comes to picking audio quality.

  I’d say they are doing their best already just to save bandwidth costs.

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Same for Youtube for ages. But Yt has separate channels for audio, why can’t they just switch, if the tab is out of focus?

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  • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Ads. Ads are more important to them the anything else.

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    • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Ads don’t have audio? That’s news to me.

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• Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I never really had much interest in music streaming services, given the wealth of storage on modern devices, and the ease of ripping audio from almost any source in existence.

  Do we need a constant internet connection to listen to music? Is it that hard to use VLC, and just buy/download what you want, and rip what you can’t?

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  • FurryMemesAccount@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Using VLC is easy. Having good musical taste and finding the time to renew your library so it doesn’t grow stale is hard.

    I know, I used to download all my stuff and now I just get YouTube music started on a piece I like and let it autoplay forever while I work, do a tabletop campaign, play videogames… I find that this way, I find the music it plays to be in the right mood 98% of the time.

    It disgusts me to say it but it just works and saves me a lot of time.

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    • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I guess a big factor would be constant access to the internet on your mobile devices. I usually travel through internet “dead zones” (no cell coverage, wifi, or just in a building that doubles as a Faraday cage), so I find having offline music a lifeline for staving off boredom. That could be why it appeals to me more - plus the whole “they can’t take it away” side.

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  • Samskara@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Music discovery is the greatest feature besides having most music available without having to rip it first. Shared playlists are fantastic as well. The platforms automatically recommend music for you, can play music similar to one song you like, and so on.

    How do you share a curated playlist of songs with someone else without something like Spotify?

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    • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      A .zip archive :) or for that matter, a YouTube Playlist that you can just use YTDL to copy for yourself

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• axum@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  As if this fucking matters all while the ai hype literally spins up power plants just to handle the energy usage

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s so so frustrating. AI is cool, I get it, LLMs are impressive, but we’re in such a bubble right now. Every company is like “damn, that other company is doing a cool thing with AI, we need to make sure our shareholders think we’re doing cool things with AI too!” So they make flashy AI things and it feeds back into the cycle because obviously other companies and their shareholders see it, because these companies are publicly traded.

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• CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Wait until they learn about Youtube, TikTok and Instagram.

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  • mang0@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Youtube and tiktok are video platforms (instagram turned into one some years after creation). Telling them to stop having videos is equivalent to saying they should cease to exist. Spotify is a music streaming platform. Telling them to stop having videos has a minimal impact on their business model, which is evident by the fact that Spotify was widely successful before they started including videos.

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• ape_din@lemmy.ml [bot] ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  im happy i dont use spotify. NewPipe all the way!

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