I've been thinking more about music's carbon footprint, and in doing so this month I prepared a short essay for possible publication on the subject. Corrections and suggestions are invited:
Music’s Contribution to Global Warming
How much does
music contribute to global heating? If ethnomusicologists are to contribute our
understandings of people making music to discussions surrounding carbon
emissions, greenhouse gases, and the climate emergency, it would be useful to
know at the outset how much all the activities surrounding music production,
delivery, and consumption contribute to the overall emission of greenhouse
gases (GHGs) that have been heating the Planet.
In the
preindustrial era, of course, musical activities did almost nothing to raise
global temperatures. Musical activities made a larger contribution to GHG
output and climate change during the industrial, mass consumption era. Musical instrument
and sheet music distribution, radio, recordings and television utilized energy
resources on a larger scale, as did the shift to electronically amplified
instruments. Ironically, in our post-industrial era, the delivery and
consumption of music via the internet requires more energy than the
manufacture, distribution and consumption of music on vinyl records, cassettes,
and CDs did during their years of peak use (Brennan and Devine 2019).
Music GHG statistics are few and far
between; much more research needs doing, but on the face of it musical
activities contribute a very small proportion of greenhouse gas emissions to
the world’s total. We do have reliable GHG estimates for all musical activities
in the UK in 2009. We also have them for recorded music in the US from
1977-2016. With US figures adjusted upwards to include live performances, in
2009 the musical activities in the UK and US accounted for about 3 million of
the then-total 48 billion tonnes of GHG emissions, or .00625%, a miniscule
amount.[1]
Extrapolating from the UK and US to the rest of the world, the contribution of
the music industry overall in 2009 is unlikely to have exceeded .02% or
two-hundredths of one percent; still seemingly insignificant. When only 90
corporations, the vast majority being fossil fuel producers such as Exxon and
state entities such as GAZPROM (Russian Federation) and Aramco (Saudi Arabia),
contribute more than 70% of GHGs annually (Heede 2014), one wonders whether
ethnomusicologists’ time wouldn’t be better spent in convincing our
institutions to divest from fossil fuels than in encouraging the music industry
to reduce GHGs. Here’s a more optimistic
way to think about it: the US music industry contributes almost as much to the US’
annual gross domestic product (GDP) as the automobile industry.[2]
Everyone knows that the auto industry is moving, however slowly, towards more
efficient gasoline engines and hybrid and electric vehicles. Few doubt that an
all-electric vehicle future would make a significant reduction to GHGs, so long
as most of the electricity comes from renewable energy sources. The same could
be said if the music industry moved to a carbon-neutral future.
Let’s look at
GHGs more closely (fig. 1).
Those emitted by human activities consist of carbon dioxide (CO2)
from burning fossil fuels (76%); methane from agricultural activities, waste
management, energy use and biomass (16%); nitrogen oxides from fertilizer use
and other agricultural activities (6%); and fluorinated gases from industrial
processes, refrigeration and so on (2%). Considered in terms of energy source
(fig. 2), global GHGs come from electricity and heat production (25%), industries
that burn fossil fuels on site for energy (21%), agriculture, forestry and
other land use (24%), fossil fuels burned for transportation (14%), fuel burned
to heat and cool buildings (6%), and other (10%) (United States Environmental
Protection Agency).
From 1970 to 2011 global CO2 emissions increased by nearly 100%, with
3/4 of the increase coming from industrial processes and fossil fuel burning. In
2012 the total amount of GHG’s emitted as a result of human activities had
risen to 53 billion tonnes from 48 billion in 2009 (The World Bank).
Three studies of the UK and US music
industries help in understanding music’s contribution to global warming. First,
the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University conducted a report for
the environmental organization Julie’s Bicycle on the sources and amount of
GHGs generated in 2007 by the UK music market (Bottrill et al. 2007; Bottrill
et al. 2010). The report calculated an annual total of 540 million kilograms
(kg.) ( = 540,000 tonnes) of GHGs, coming from the following sources: manufacture
and distribution of musical instruments, books and sheet music, and recorded
music, 138 million kg.; live performances (including audience travel which
generated 231,00 million kg.), 402 million kg. This 540,000 tonnes applied only
to the UK. Although it included GHGs generated by music’s share of distribution
over the internet, in 2007 internet downloads and streaming were fewer than
today while correspondingly more music was delivered via CD.
A second useful
study compared the amounts of GHGs required to manufacture and deliver music on
plastic (vinyl, cassette, and CD) versus the internet. The study took into
consideration that some albums delivered digitally over the internet were subsequently
burned to CD-R discs for CD use and kept in jewel cases. The authors concluded
that “Despite the increased energy and emissions associated with Internet data
flows, purchasing music digitally reduces the energy and CO2 emissions
associated with delivering music to customers by between 40 and 80% from the
best-case physical CD delivery, depending on whether a customer then burns the
files to CD or not” (Weber et al, 2009). Ten years later, consumers are burning
many fewer CDs; indeed, most computers today no longer contain optical drives
for disc burning.
This second study
predicted that a shift to internet music delivery would significantly reduce GHGs.
However, as its authors acknowledge, it was conducted for two IT corporations
(Microsoft and Intel) that had an interest in seeing that kind of result. What
is the situation today, when most recorded music is delivered to customers via
internet streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Pandora, and so on? The
results are not quite so sanguine. In third environmental cost study, Matt
Brennan and Kyle Devine chose to sample GHG outputs from certain key years from
1907-2016. Devine terms this shift from plastic to internet delivery the
“dematerialization” of music. They reported total GHG outputs for the US only, from
vinyl, cassettes, and CDs, versus GHG outputs from internet delivery via mp3
and streaming. They reported (fig. 3) on the years 1977, 1988, 2000, and
2013-2016 (Brennan and Devine 2019; Devine 2019). Figure 3 shows that in 1977
US CO2 emissions from the manufacture of and
sale of music (chiefly on vinyl records) were 140 million kg. The
first CDs appeared in 1982. In 1988 when vinyl records made up roughly 19% of
sales revenues, CDs 20%. and cassettes and 8-tracks 60%, the total CO2 figure
for the US was slightly lower, 136 million kg. In 2000 when CDs were at their
peak revenue (and not many vinyl records and cassettes were sold) that number
had increased to 157 million kg., almost all from CDs. And yet by 2016, when
the revenue from CDs was 1/8 of what it had been in 2000, and when most music recordings
were sold via mp3 downloads or by subscription streaming on the internet, the
US energy costs of music delivery had increased to as much as 350 million kg.
of GHGs, or 350,000 tonnes (Brennan and Devine 2019; RIAA US Sales Database).
How could this
be? It seems counterintuitive that the environmental costs of making plastic
CDs and jewel cases could be about half as much as internet music delivery with
little or no plastic product (and waste). It seems inconceivable that a shift
from a manufacturing economy to a service economy for recorded music could
result in double the CO2 emissions. Yet what drove up the cost of internet
delivery was “the energy used to power online music listening. Storing and
processing music in the cloud depends on vast data centres that use a
tremendous amount of resources and energy” (Brennan and Devine 2019, 3).[3]
To be sure, Brennan and Devine did not
calculate the environmental cost of distributing LPs, cassettes and CDs to
consumers in record stores. Nor did they calculate the environmental costs of
making the record, CD and DVD players. Doing so would have increased the GHG
figures for 1977, 1988, and 2000. But they also did not calculate the costs of
making the smartphones, mp3 players, and computers that consumers rely on today
to download and stream their music. Moreover, as the US population grew from 203
million in 1970 to 307 million in 2010, it’s likely that there were proportionately
half again as many music consumers in the latter year than the former,
consuming 50% more energy, And of course, unlike the Oxford University study of
UK music’s carbon footprint, Brennan and Devine did not attempt to calculate
the environmental costs of live music which, extrapolating from the UK study (Bottrill
et al. 2007), would have been for the US about three times more than for recorded
music, or approximately 1.05 million tonnes of GHGs. Add that to the carbon
footprint of recorded music and in 2016 the US likely generated around 1.4
million tonnes. If the UK’s footprint was 540,000 million tonnes in 2009, extrapolating
to 2016 from that and then adding the US figures would result in a UK plus US annual
total somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million tonnes ( = 6.6 billion US pounds) of
GHGs for 2016.
Efforts
to reduce the music industry’s contribution to global warming have been
underway for more than a decade. The Julie’s Bicycle-sponsored 2007 Oxford
Study resulted in a variety of actions to lower music’s carbon footprint, such
as the change from plastic CD packaging to cardboard digipacks. In 2013
REVERB was created and dedicated to reducing touring bands’ carbon footprints
insofar as possible. On their tours, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, Dead and
Company, Drake, Walk the Moon, and others reduce carbon use by employing solar
energy, distributing reusable water bottles, providing solar charging stations
at concerts, and handing out information about environmental issues, green
products and tech, and so on. REVERB sponsors a Farm-to-Stage program that
works with local farmers to provide artists and their crews with locally
sourced food (REVERB). By 2018, Spotify had closed
almost all of its data centers and reduced its carbon footprint by 1,500 tons
of CO2 while switching to Google cloud services, which like competitor Apple has
“gone green.” By converting to solar power and purchasing renewable energy
certificates (that work like carbon offsets) they can claim their data centers are
carbon neutral. In July, 2019 a group of music industry professionals formed an
organization called Music Declares Emergency, calling for “the music industry
to acknowledge how its practices impact the environment and to commit to taking
urgent action” and to “work toward making our businesses ecologically
sustainable and regenerative.” Some of the suggestions include reducing the
energy used on tours, greening merchandise, using sustainable materials, and
purchasing carbon offsets. Many musicians have signed on as supporters (MUSIC
DECLARES EMERGENCY). And because music has the power to raise
environmental consciousness and incite environmental activism its impact goes
well beyond the boundaries of the music industry to galvanize the environmental
movement more broadly, whether targeting fossil fuel corporations, agrochemical
producers, or threats to species extinction.[4]
References
Bottrill,
Catherine, Geoff Lye, Max Boykoff and Diana Liverman. 2007. First Step: UK
Music Industry Greenhouse Gas Emissions for 2007. Executive summary.
London: Julie’s Bicycle.
Bottrill,
Catherine, Geoff Lye, and Max Boykoff. 2010. “Carbon soundings: greenhouse gas
emissions of the UK music industry.” Environmental Research Letters 5,
doi 10:1088/1748-9326/5/1/014019.
Brennan,
Matt, and Kyle Devine. 2019. “Music streaming has a far worse carbon footprint
than the heyday of records and CDs—new findings.” The Conversation,
April 7. https://theconversation.com/music-streaming-has-a-far-worse-carbon-footprint-than-the-heyday-of-records-and-cds-new-findings-114944.
Accessed 30 August 2019.
Devine,
Kyle. 2019. Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
ECOSONG.
N.D. Ecosong.Net. https://www.ecosong.band/.
Accessed 30 August, 2019.
Heede,
Richard. 2014. “Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to
fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854-2010.” Climate Change 122 (1-2):
229-241.
MUSIC
DECLARES EMERGENCY. N.D. https://www.musicdeclares.net/. Accessed 30 August,
2019.
REVERB.
N.D. Reverb: About Us. https://reverb.org/.
Accessed 30 August, 2019.
RIAA U.S.
Sales Database. N.D. U.S. Recorded Music Revenues by Format and U.S. Recorded
Music Sales Volume by Format, 1977-2018. https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/.
Accessed 25 September 2019.
Siwek,
Stephen, and Joshua Friedlander. 2018. The US Music Industries: Jobs and
Benefits. Prepared for the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of
America). http://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/US-Music-Industries-Jobs-Benefits-Siwek-Economists-Inc-April-2018-1-2.pdf.
Accessed 19 September 2019.
The World
Bank. N.D. “Total greenhouse gas emissions.” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.GHGT.KT.CE.
Accessed 18 September 2019.
United
States Environmental Protection Agency. N.D. “Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Data.” https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data.
Accessed 18 September 2019.
Weber,
Christopher L., Jonathan O. Koomey, and H. Scott Matthews. 2009. “The Energy
and Climate Change Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods.” Final report
to Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252659417_The_Energy_and_Climate_Change_Impacts_Of_Different_Music_Delivery_Methods.
Accessed 19 September 2019.
[1] Calculated by
combining and extrapolating from Bottrill et al. 2010 and Brennan and Devine
2019. A (metric) tonne is 1000 kilograms, or 2200 pounds, which is 1.1 times
the US ton of 2000 pounds.
[2] Siwek and
Friedlander 2018 calculated that in 2015 the music industry contributed $143
billion to the US economy, 4/5 of the auto industry’s contribution.
[3] Their study, “The
Cost of Music,” was widely reported in the press in April, 2019. Devine’s book
on the subject, Decomposed (2019) offers more detail. Some of these data
centers now are powered partly if not fully by solar energy, however.
[4] Ecosong, a collaboration
among musicians, media makers, scientists and community organizations, is one
of many such efforts (ECOSONG).
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