This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Henry Ryeder. Find him on Instagram at @henryryeder. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
What must be done? What will be done?
The eternal push and pull between these two calculations, themselves highly fraught subjects, seems to be the calling card of our generation. We look outside and the sky is orange, we open social media and we see the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, we go to school terrified that it might be our last day on earth.
In the midst of everything we know, there is the omnipresent cloud of solution; a term so entrenched in Americanized labor-speak that its very mention can stir up heavy emotions. “Solutions? You waited for the oceans to boil and for hundreds of millions of people to die…to talk about solutions?”
These conversations often show in places of public discourse: Twitter, Instagram, explainers on TikTok, in which participants can afford to don the masks of the philosophies they hold dear. An angry critic of systemic inadequacy in the comment section is simply that, seemingly distant from the rest of their life in which they’re an active contributor to that system.
This is the peculiarly removed nature of democratic debate under 21st Century capitalism. Technology has allowed us to hold a perspective so extremely displaced from the means of production that our complicity in global poverty, war, and ecological disruption is nearly invisible. This is perhaps best exemplified in an activity that many of us well-intentioned lefties turn to before, during, and after our pseudo-political spats on the internet: streaming music.
In Kyle Devine’s Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, Devine argues in the ideology of making music, “There is a highly intoxicating form of mystification at work.” Therefore, music is culturally “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.” The sanctity that music’s cultural connotations provide often end up protecting the industry rather than the artist, Devine argues. Most of us are familiar with the headline examples: streaming companies refusing to adequately compensate artists for the value they provide the platforms, yet many of the uglier truths remains to be baked into our social consciousness.
All of this is exacerbated by the mediums through which we enjoy music. Devine posits that the music industry has always sold customers on the romance of their product while in turn using exploitative means to produce. The industry’s early 20th Century use of shellac led to inhumane labor conditions for harvest workers in India. The introduction of vinyl in the mid-20th Century introduced an especially pollutive nature to the product; vinyl takes centuries to decompose, emitting toxic chemicals into the soil while doing so.
You’d be forgiven in assuming that music streaming is a quantum leap forward in the reduction of the industry’s (and therefore customers’) impacts on the environment. With no physical media in hand, the industry must be close to “net zero,” right? Unfortunately, this couldn’t be further from the case. The servers used to store and access digital information use enormous amounts of energy, leading to a carbon footprint that exceeds the emissions of the industry in the previous century. This calculation also takes into account the production and powering of the devices we use as end-user products to access that information, which in turn have been linked to the same labor exploitation that defined much of the music industry in the past.
So is streaming bad for the environment? Let’s take a closer look.
While the distribution of CD’s and vinyl include supply chains with significant CO2 emissions, the emissions from the production, distribution, and maintenance of our more contemporary music devices (laptops and smartphones) is gargantuan in comparison. A 2020 report by the Society for Film and Media Studies estimates that the “massive infrastructure of data centers, networks, and devices, including computers, phones, and TVs” that streaming relies on constitutes approximately 3-4% of the global carbon footprint. To clarify, this is the infrastructure itself, not streaming alone, though this should demonstrate that the supply chains for streaming aren’t better for the environment simply because they seem less physical.
So let’s compare the carbon footprints of the production of CD’s and vinyl to the emissions produced by streaming music. According to analyses by Keele University and New Statesman, 5 hours of streaming music has the CO2 impact of the production/use of 1 CD. 19 hours of streaming music is equivalent to the production/use of one vinyl record.
While that might seem like a relatively innocuous statistic, its placement in context with CD’s yields some interesting results. The average Spotify listener listens to 3695 minutes of music a year. Translate this into CD’s using the analysis listed above, and the average streaming listener is producing the CO2 emissions equivalent of 12.26 CD’s a year.
How do we compare that to the carbon footprint of the average music consumer at the peak of CD revenue in 2000? Funny enough, we have the internet to help. A 2007 IPSOS report claims that the average music consumer bought 2.8 CD’s “in the past six months.” By 2007, the sale of CD’s was in rapid decline, its total revenue constituting a little less than half of what it was in 2000.
However, even without adjusting for inflation, both nationally and market-related (CD’s were worth a lot more in 2000 than in 2007), this data leads us to the conclusion that the average music consumer bought 11 CD’s a year at the peak of sales in 2000.
Inflation adjustments become more unwieldy the farther back in history one goes as the units of measurement are subject to change, as well as many other economic factors. Still, the revenue from vinyl record sales at their peak are comparable to the revenue from the sale of CD’s at their peak, even without calculating the inherent cost difference in production (vinyl was and is much more expensive to produce than CD’s.) Therefore, it’s safe to assume that the carbon footprint from vinyl is roughly similar to or less than the carbon footprint from CD’s.
So the average music listener bought 11 CD’s a year in 2000. Compare that 11 CD’s a year to the carbon footprint equivalent of more than 12 CD’s a year through streaming today. This doesn’t even take into account Spotify’s continuous user growth year by year. If we’re already exceeding the carbon footprint of the music industry of past generations, it’s safe to say that music streaming is certainly bad for the environment.
And yes, we’re all complicit by continuously streaming music. I want to make this clear though – it’s a mark of your curiosity in your own contributions to the Climate Crisis that you want to know more about this issue. With that in mind, it would be a disservice to robotically list these statistics without interrogating the larger questions about streaming. What are these firms trying to do, and do they have any semblance of vision beyond the fiscal year?
To understand these points, it’s useful to look at how the music industry’s Wall Street darling, Spotify, has accrued so much power so quickly. In the last fifteen years, Spotify has gone from a niche streaming service of 6 million users in 2011 to over 600 million users today. This has come with a hefty 10 billion dollar market capitalization, despite Spotify’s consistent failure to deliver net income in 20 of its 28 fiscal quarters since 2017. While this may appear a wild overvaluation to the untrained (rational) eye, the investor calculus is similar to several other Big Tech whales: user data.
In his article “Music as a Technology of Surveillance”, Eric Drott defines user data as a metric in adding value to a company:
“ – As a commodity, data about users can be sold directly to third parties, such as ad servers, credit agencies, insurers, or general-purpose data aggregators.
– As a factor of production, such data can be used to define the users whose attention is sold to advertisers, specifying their demographic and psychographic attributes and thereby making each audience segment more valuable.
– As an asset, user data can contribute to a platform’s market valuation, making it a more attractive vehicle for capital investment or acquisition.”
Drott mentions a particularly dystopian public espousal of the importance of user data to Spotify’s business model. Speaking at an advertising summit in New York in 2015, Spotify’s Head of Programmatic Solutions Jana Jakovljevic claimed, “We have 39,000 showering playlists on Spotify, 550,000 shower streams per day. So we not only know what are users are listening to, we also know their personal activities as well.”
The inclusion of this information isn’t meant to scare you, nor is it meant to obscure these two issues as being exactly the same: they’re not. However, this wanton lack of respect for users beyond their utility as data puts something in stark relief: Spotify doesn’t give a shit.
On a company page emblazoned with the headline, “We Want To Be Part Of The Solution”, Spotify links to a document containing an internal review of the corporation’s GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions in 2022 and 2023. The report attributes the vast majority of their CO2 emissions as comprising “Scope 3”, meaning emissions existing within the corporate supply chain but outside of Spotify’s “direct control.” In this analysis, more than 30% of emissions come from cloud and end use (emissions related to the energy used in the storage and retrieval of information.)
It’s peculiar, though not terribly surprising, that Spotify would go to such lengths to categorize 98.9% of its carbon emissions as “not directly controlled” by Spotify. While it certainly minimizes the corporation’s responsibility at annual greenwashing summits, it does little to address the fact that any part of Spotify’s supply chain wouldn’t exist without Spotify in the first place.
While corporate accountability is lacking (and has historically lacked) across industries regarding their contributions to the Climate Crisis, it should be noted that there is nuance among different firms’ responses and self-evaluations. Take Netflix, for example. Yes, they’ve failed in nearly every regard to achieve “Net Zero” by 2022. Their use of “renewable diesel” and carbon off-set programs have rightfully come under scrutiny by climate activists exposing Netflix’s self-espoused dedication to Climate Justice as hollow and self-serving. Still, Netflix sought to be under that scrutiny. In its perhaps futile gesture, Netflix welcomed criticism, and the welcoming of criticism (theoretically) opens the door for transparency, accountability, and change.
Corporations aren’t people, despite the ruminations of a certain former presidential candidate, yet they aren’t monoliths either. I have no doubt that there are laborers and executives at Spotify truly frightened by the contributions of music streaming to the Climate Crisis. Yet if Spotify’s “Part of the Solution” report is any indication, these would-be whistleblowers are far from having the amount of breath they need to make change. I’m not claiming that I know what a “net zero” streaming platform, or industrial world for that matter, would look like. Some would argue that such a thing is impossible. Others would argue that that very assumption of impossibility mitigates meaningful attempts for change.
Yet it’s important to call out these corporations for commoditizing us without our consent, extracting and using vast amounts of energy, and having the gall to claim that they’re “doing their part.” Spotify’s self-released analysis neatly categorizes the bulk of its pollution as out of its control. The implicit assumption is that its gross impacts on the environment don’t apply to Spotify proper, they exist in another place; an away place.
There is no away place. I’ve said it before, just as greater minds have before, and I’ll say it again, as greater minds will continue to: we aren’t apart from the environment, we are part of the environment. We are the environment, the environment is us.
This point was made in a panel conducted last July for the Institute of Art and Ideas on the topic of whether or not capitalism must fall in order to “solve” the Climate Crisis. Helen Czerski, a British physicist and oceanographer, spoke passionately about the need for corporations to take accountability, emphasizing that there is no “away.” Troy Vetesse, the brilliant and humorously self-proclaimed “Token Marxist” on the panel, highlighted that capitalism is a peculiarly decentralized economic system that discourages social good by encouraging damaging competition. As far as the Climate Crisis is concerned, “Everything’s only getting worse,” Vetesse ominously claimed (a vast oversimplification.)
The third speaker on the panel was Rebecca Henderson, a Harvard Business School professor with pitch-perfect British RP. Henderson was capitalism’s standard-bearer on stage, claiming that corporations listen to their customers. Henderson also spoke about the need for radical change, for a form of socialism with people such as Vetesse and Czerski in charge, while remaining skeptical that a spiritual awakening would happen en masse, and in time, for the necessary changes to occur.
I found this lecture fascinating because all of these participants, from seemingly disparate perspectives, were pretty much in agreement with each other. While Henderson and Vetesse quibbled over trusting different political and economic systems, they both clearly advocated for sweeping progressive change. The system was the enemy on stage, hanging over the panel much like the cloud of corporatist doublespeak on “solutions”, not the speakers to one another.
We will have to advocate for one another, be kind and patient with one another, while also pushing one another to make the changes, both systemic and personal, that must be done to achieve Climate Justice. We’ll debate about what Climate Justice means, and we must be quick and pointed in our discussions and decision-making.
All of this falls under what must happen. What will happen will certainly be different, but it doesn’t have to be that different. In this massive issue, it might seem that the impact of streaming music seems infinitesimal. If the fate of our planet didn’t hinge on tiny fluctuations in our impact on temperatures and sea levels, that might be the case. But this is the world we live in.
I don’t expect you to all give up your Spotify accounts. I don’t even think that would be the most effective political threat you could be making right now. But I hope that this helps put into perspective our individual roles in an industry that purposefully obscures its gross harm of the planet and exploitation of laborers. I also hope it makes you appreciate the music you do listen to a bit more.
So what should we do? I don’t expect us to return to a full mindset of scarcity, at least not one that Mother Earth doesn’t thrust upon us. However, purposefully downloading your favorite songs, cutting down on data streaming, and listening to physical media you already have is an effective start. I was speaking to an older member of my family recently when she mentioned the ubiquity of pianos at parties in the 1940’s and 1950’s. She’s white and conservative, and we can write novels about the process of American exploitation that allowed that piano to end up in that New England home. But there’s something there to be romantic, even excited about.
What better screw-you to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek than to say, “We don’t need your stupid music, we’ll make our own”? It certainly wouldn’t cost your favorite artists a damn penny! And you can still see them in concert, buy their merchandise and records. That simple exercise in restraint might even make listening to music that much more rewarding. And what better way to appreciate the food of love than to reap it seasonally?
What do you think of streaming’s impact on the environment? Is streaming bad for the environment? Are you looking to unplug from Spotify? Leave a comment below!
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