Is "new" music also "green"?

From www.lavoce.info, together with Luca Bonacina and Renato Casagrandi.

“We never thought a video could be watched more times than a 32-bit integer could count (2,147,483,647 views, ed.), but that was before we met PSY's “Gangnam Style” – it's been viewed so many times that we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer!” (YouTube, December 2014)

Those were the days (or were they?), when you tried to stuff a CD player into your jacket or trouser pocket, and walked (never ran) making sure not to make it “skip”; when you made mixtapes by recording off the radio, wearing out the tape by taping over it again and again. Sounds like prehistory, doesn't it? Yet these are vivid memories from the early or late adolescence of the people writing this piece (our three ages add up to 102 years). Good times, above all, for those who actually sold music: the record labels. It was in 2000, in fact, that physical format sales hit their peak: 730 million CDs in the United States alone. Meanwhile, Napster, the first "pirate" digital download platform (or free-sharing platform, depending on your point of view), had already been around for a year.

The times they are a-changin’ (Bob Dylan, 1965). 

Barely fifteen years have passed since then, and free (and legal) online access to music content has exploded. A few months ago, a music video on YouTube was watched for the 2,147,483,648th time: the counter ran out of bits to keep track. Thanks to streaming services like Spotify, all it takes is an ordinary smartphone to access most of the music that exists – and it's all free. Meanwhile, CD sales have dropped to less than 20% of their 2000 peak. In 2014, for the first time, streaming services generated higher revenues than CD sales in the United States [1].

Figure 1. Music industry revenue broken down by sector. Source: RIAA, 2015 [1]

You say you want a revolution (The Beatles, 1968).

For once, the environment wins, right? No more tons of plastic and paper to produce, distribute, recycle… That's how many people describe this paradigm shift from owning a physical "object" (musical or otherwise) to simply accessing a service: a genuine "green revolution." Perhaps, though, it's simply become less intuitive to assess the environmental impact of something you can't physically hold in your hands. Data centers, servers, routers, laptops, smartphones: they're all the physical counterpart of that immaterial world we interact with every day. All things that, obviously, carry an economic and environmental cost: from an energy standpoint, the Internet is already responsible for a tenth of global annual consumption [2]. To put it in perspective, that's the energy "bill" of Germany and Japan combined [2].

The dark side of the moon (Pink Floyd, 1973).

So are we really sure that streaming an album is all that conscientiously "green" compared to buying the CD? That's the question Dagfinn Bach – nomen omen – asked himself in his report “The Dark Side Of The Tune: The Hidden Energy Cost Of Digital Music Consumption”. And the striking result of his study is that just 27 streamed plays of 12 tracks would be enough to match the energy consumption required to produce and ship a single CD. The total number of tracks streamed in 2014, according to Nielsen Music, reached 164 billion [3]: if Bach's calculations were correct, in energy terms that would be the equivalent of producing and delivering another half a billion CDs across the United States. Add that to the CDs actually sold last year, and you get roughly the same figure as during the physical format's heyday: in short, no substantial advantage in energy terms.

Granted, Bach's calculation doesn't take into account, for instance, where the streamed tracks actually come from. On Spotify, less than 10% of tracks are downloaded from the server: more than half (the ones we listen to most often) are saved to local storage [4].

All the people, so many people (Blur, 1994).

Even these reassuring observations, however, could pale in comparison to the massive, exponential expansion of internet access expected in the coming years. Telecoms company Ericsson estimates that by 2020, 90% of the world's adults will own a mobile device, and a comparable share of those will be smartphones [5]. Monthly per capita data consumption is expected to rise from the current 900 MB to 3 GB [5]: The Dark Side of the Tune could end up irreparably overshadowing the bright side of the environmental picture, reducing measures aimed at improving the Internet's energy efficiency to mere palliatives [6]. Which raises the question: is it really possible, in some way, to go back to the old CD, as Bach suggests?

A little-known fact is that, during these years of transition from physical to digital, the supply of music has grown dramatically: by 2008 the number of albums released in the United States had tripled compared to 2003. In today's world, where anyone is free to get their music heard without the filter of record labels, a case like Sixto "Sugar Man" Rodriguez would no longer be possible: indeed, the number of independent musicians (in every sense, including independence from a secondary day job) in the United States grew fivefold between 2003 and 2012. What's more, accusations that Spotify pays artists too little – voiced even by prominent figures like Thom Yorke of Radiohead – have recently been debunked: it's the labels that hold on to roughly 46% of the service's revenue, leaving artists with a measly 7%. Over time, labels permitting, the system could become economically sustainable both for streaming services (Spotify has been losing money since its founding, to the tune of roughly $200 million) and for the artists themselves. Complicating matters further, in this new technological landscape, is the growing polarization of revenue distribution among artists: just 12% of the 30 million songs in Spotify's catalog account for 89% of all listens [4]. The net result is that the top 1% of artists take home 77% of total earnings – beyond this tiny fraction of "superstars" [7], the distribution flattens out, and gets a lot poorer. In short, there are always fewer truly "famous" artists earning more and more compared to everyone else.

So even in the world of music, technological transformation puts pressure on every dimension of sustainability – not just environmental, but economic and social too. Short of giving up socially fundamental gains in the free access and distribution of music (and therefore of art and culture), there's no going back. Charting a sustainable path for the music industry is a complex undertaking, but a fascinating one nonetheless: the future of music is, in some sense, our future too.

LUCA BONACINA – Born in 1990, graduated with honors in Sound Design and Music Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, with a double degree from the Alta Scuola Politecnica. An expert in Signal Processing, he currently serves as Italian Official Representative for European Innovation Academy, an international StartUp accelerator.

RENATO CASAGRANDI – Renato Casagrandi is a professor of Ecology at the Politecnico di Milano. His research interests have always focused on the spatio-temporal dynamics of ecological and epidemiological processes. Among his various teaching activities, he oversees the “Polygame” project within the “Global Change and Sustainability” course at the Alta Scuola Politecnica. 

REFERENCES

1: RIAA (2015), News and Notes on 2014 RIAA Music Industry Shipment and Revenue Statistics

2: Mark Mills, Digital Power Group (2013), “The Cloud Begins With Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power”

3: Nielsen Music (2015), 2014 Nielsen Music Report

4: Kreitz and Niemela (2010), Spotify – Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming

5: Ericsson Mobility Report (2014)

6: Cappiello, C. et al. (2013), “Monitoring and assessing energy consumption and CO₂ emissions in cloud-based systems”, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Manchester, UK, 13-16 October

7: Sherwin Rosen (1981), “The Economics Of Superstars”, The American Economic Review

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