Grab your granola and read.....

The Carbon Case for Downloading Music



A new study has found that downloading music is substantially better from an emissions perspective than buying compact discs.

The study, which was financed by both Microsoft and Intel and written by two academics at Carnegie Mellon University and a third affiliated with Stanford University, found that buying an album digitally reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 80 percent relative to a best-case scenario for purchasing a CD.

That scenario involves a customer buying a CD online and having it delivered via a light-duty truck; the more carbon-intensive options examined by the study are express air shipment of the CD, and the customer visiting a store to buy the CD.

The advantage for digital comes largely because CDs must be manufactured, packaged and transported over long distances.

Even in a situation in which a consumer downloads the music — and then burns it onto a CD and puts it in a CD case — the carbon differential is 40 percent in favor of the download, the study found. If the downloaded music is not burned onto a CD, the differential rises to 80 percent.

However, there is room for debate. The high carbon cost associated with visiting the store, for example, rises when customers make the trip by car. If a consumer walks to the store instead, then buying a CD is “nearly equivalentâ€

I'm going to take this article and post it on a local music board. The last brick and mortar store here in Lincoln is going to close, leaving us with Best Buy, Wal-mart, etc. I haven't bought an actual hard copy CD since paying off the March Madness bet.

As soon as it equals the hard copy in terms of the buying/browsing experience, the packaging and liner notes, and sound quality, I'll switch to downloading exclusively.

kyle could've done a better chart than that.

It's like they do all that good work, and then get lazy at Chart Time.

This made me laugh out loud.

They need to do a study on how much useless studies hurt the enviroment. Wasn't it obvious that a paperless product with no tangible form and doesn't have to ride on truck was going to be better for the environment.

ECM label music sounds better to be because the packaging is pleasing. I am old school... kinesthetic, visual.

But most people download many more albums than they would buy physical copies.

If you buy 2 physical copies and someone else downloads 20 - 30 digital copies who uses more energy?

Also the graph apparently only takes into consideration the energy requirements of the supplier and not the 'customer' since digital downloading doesn't use any 'computer energy'. News to me.

If you want to think having a monitor and PC switched on all day uses less energy than walking round to the shops then fine, that's your problem.

Also downloads are sound garbage and reduce rock n' roll to some kind of computer geek saddo hobby like discussing Linux or something.

If you want to actually make a genuinely positive impact on the environment become a vegetarian.

i feel that, but i am not holding my breath thanks to this troubling development:


Hugh Pickens writes
"Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, tests his incoming students each year by having them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality, and he reports that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. Berger says that young people seemed to prefer 'sizzle sounds' that MP3s bring to music because it is a sound they are familiar with. 'The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC),' writes Berger. 'To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 — particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.' Dale Dougherty writes that the context of the music changes our perception of the sound, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by others. 'All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It's mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won't be obvious to them.'"

Most folks don't walk around to the shops to buy records if they aren't buying them online. They drive to places like Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart to buy music along with other goods in generally low MPG vehicles and consume a bunch of fast food and Starbucks coffee in the process. They also most likely have their computers going all day too and aren't downloading music. I believe the customer's computer energy is included in data center energy and for some odd reason the actual "computer" energy figure is used when you reproduce a hard copy.

I find it rather humorous you claim downloads reduce rock n roll to some kind of computer geek saddo hobby while posting it on an internet message board.

i wonder if this is like the pepsi challenge (as explained in some book i read, maybe Blink) where more people prefer the first sip of pepsi (aka a sample size) but more prefer a whole serving of coke.

The loudness wars is about first impact being impressive, but it is tiring on your ears over the course of an album.

It's not really that funny if you understand what I'm talking about.

Writing an e-mail or posting on a message board is a perfectly acceptable way of communicating with other people. However when you 'computerize' music, or art in general, what you are really doing is snuffing out what makes it special in the first place.

No one would say you can truly appreciate say, just as an example, Jacques Louis David's Oath of the Horatii by downloading a 400x500 pixel JPG of it from the internet in the same way that you could appreciate it if you saw the actual painting at the Louvre. Music is no different.

Rock n Roll is not digitizable just as in the same way a Xerox of your face isn't alive, it's just a lifeless reproduction with no human or physical element to it.

It's plainly obvious that live music, provided its performed well of course, is the best possible way to experience music. Although it is a step down the next best way to experience music is on the highest quality medium (such as vinyl) on the best available hi-fi equipment.

By the time you get to mp3's 'experienced' via iPods or PCs you have reached the worst possible way to listen to the music, the way that is such a wisp of the source, that's become so degenerate from the original, that it barely exists in any meaningful way, not even as pits and lands on the surface of a CD.

It's not called 'file sharing' for nothing. That's what music becomes when it's digitalized, a file, the same as any other file, a JPEG, an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document.

At the risk of sounding puffed up, I happen to think music is more than that, that it should affect you in a way that an Microsoft icon or a desktop wallpaper could never come close to.

So you see communicating via a message board is nothing like listening to music unless you want to flatter me by saying that what I write is art.

Having a computer switched on all day uses hardly any energy at all, actually.

We just had an energy audit done on our house...

never heard of that soda study. weird. i think the mp3 thing has more to do with the fact that those kids have never heard music any other way so it is their default preference.

No, I would actually say that both you and I, plus the rest of us here at Obner are an anomaly when it comes to music and downloading. We are a dying breed and the vast majority of "normal" people don't see it your way. They are much happier listening to it in the manner that Thrillhouse's post so eloquently mentioned and generally view it as a disposable commodity today. To a lot of mostly young individuals, there is no difference between posting on a message board or Facebook in their case and downloading a new album.
And then there are some folk who personify myself that would much rather download and sample the roughly 20 disc you mentioned rather than buy a bunch of crap. To me buying a mediocre to poor album is the same as wasting food.