Music downloads are good for Mother Earth
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Environmentalists and, for that matter, anyone seriously concerned with environmental issues, will be interested in possibilities raised by a new study commissioned by Microsoft and Intel.
It centers on music downloading and says it’s far more acceptable than CDs.
The authors are Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University, and Jonathan G. Koomey, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University.
They assess the energy and CO2 emissions associated with delivering one music album to someone’s home either via traditional retail or e-commerce sales of compact discs, or via a digital download service.
And they conclude »»»
Given our assumptions, our results indicate the superiority of downloadable online music, which even in the worst-case scenario produces on average 65% lower CO2 emissions than the best-case e-tail delivery method. Significantly higher savings (nearly a factor of 5) can be seen if the customer forgoes CD-R burning in favor of fully digital use, thereby eliminating the energy it took to produce the CD and its packaging.
However, the results are sensitive to both behavioral assumptions of how customers use digital music as well as several important parameters in the logistics chain of retail and etail delivery, such as customer transport to the store, CD packaging method, and final delivery to the customer’s home for e-tail. In particular online music’s superiority depends on the assumption of customer’s driving automobiles to the retail store.
“Future work should focus on new methods for digital media acquisition such as subscription and streaming services, which may increase the energy requirements of downloading digital goods,” they add.
Will the people advising and running Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US) recognize this for the lifeline it is?
Or will they insist on adhering to the old-world, old-think distribution methods which are bringing them to their knees?
And of course, whatever applies to music CDs can also apply to anything else which can be digitised and which is currently sold as physical product by corporate content industries.
Click here to read The energy and climate change impacts of different music delivery methods.
Stay tuned.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
August, 2009
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August 18th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Does this mean Al Gore will support file sharing?
August 18th, 2009 at 9:15 am
On the flip side, since most only care about CO2, what about the impact of all the jewel cases and scratched-beyond-playable CD’s/DVD’s? Where again do they end up? Landfills. And what exactly is that burnable substance in the CD/DVD made of? It sure as hell isn’t tree bark. It is polycarbonate, the colouring is usually cyanine or phthalocyanine or azo dye, the latter being non-toxic.
Why do they always go on about CO2 when even if you curb it and help reduce our influence, regardless of whether we are significant or minor contributions to climate, you still have a ridiculous amount of toxic substances humans created and/or released into the natural environment. No one seems to car about that, it’s always CO2. How strange. “Hooray, we reduced our CARBON footprint, too bad the air is toxic, and so is the water, so all our food is poisoned.”
August 18th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
I know I never buy CD’s or even burn CDR’s. It’s music subscriptions for me. Like N******.ca