TLDR: Spotify moving into video streaming will boost its environmental footprint. Learn how it impacts emissions and what listeners can do.
Spotify currently has 675 million active users. Now, as it expands into video for music streaming and as more people use Spotify, the app’s environmental footprint is set to increase.
In-video advertisements that aim to increase ad revenue involve AI to tap into a users’ preferences. This means lots of individual videos with minor differences requiring additional processing scaled to the user’s streaming resolution.
But while Spotify used to publish data on its environmental costs, its reports have been incomplete since 2021. As American author and scholar, Shoshanna Zuboff points out in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, many tech companies lack environmental accountability.
The Carbon Trust, a consultancy that helps businesses reduce their carbon footprints, works to globally promote a sustainable future and has calculated the European average carbon footprint for video streaming as producing 55g of CO₂e per hour. This CO₂e or carbon dioxide equivalent is a comparable measure of the potential effect of different greenhouse gases on the climate: 55g of CO₂e is 50 times more than audio streaming and the equivalent of microwaving four bags of popcorn.
As a music technology and AI researcher, I’m aware of the shift in responsibility that comes with Spotify’s video innovations. While companies’ significant role in generating emissions should not be diminished, the shift of responsibility from the platform to users and content creators means that better informed choices about their streaming devices and streaming quality settings larger screens need to be made. Streaming at higher resolutions becomes significant factors in increasing video’s carbon footprint.
This increased responsibility means that end users needs to make better informed choices about their streaming devices and streaming quality settings.
While companies’ significant role in generating emissions should not be diminished, this shift of responsibility to the end user means that larger screens and streaming at higher resolutions become significant factors in increasing video’s carbon footprint.
Location also affects how carbon emissions are managed. Germany has the largest carbon footprint for video streaming at 76g CO₂e per hour of streaming, reflecting its continued reliance on coal and fossil fuels. In the UK, this figure is 48g CO₂e per hour, because its energy mix includes renewables and natural gas, increasingly with nuclear as central to the UK’s low-carbon future. France, with a reliance on nuclear is the lowest, at 10g CO₂e per hour.
There is an absolute burden of responsibility on tech and media companies to reduce their carbon emissions and to be transparent about their efforts to do so. In fact, net zero cannot be achieved without commitments from the major technology companies, many of which are based in the US whose government has not ratified the Kyoto protocol and withdrew from the Paris agreement in 2020 which are both significant global efforts to combat climate change.
Eco-conscious music streaming
A French thinktank called the Shift Project advocates for people and companies to adopt “digital sobriety” (the mindful use of digital tech) to ensure efficiency and sustainability. For example, research shows that the UK could reduce its carbon output by more 16,433 tonnes if each adult sent one less thank you email a day.
Certainly aimless streaming should be avoided because video decoding can account for 35-50% of playback energy on user devices. However, music video is more than mere music. As I have argued in my own work, video “provides a layer of meaning making not present in lyrics or audio alone.”
Video can bring marginalized music makers, cultures and ideas to the foreground by tackling difficult subjects. Like the work of Syrian-American rapper, poet, activist and chaplain Mona Haydar’s Wrap My Hijab or UK grime rapper Drillminister and his critique of neo-liberalism and trickle-down economics Nouveau Riche.
To minimize the environmental footprint of your own music streaming, use Wi-Fi rather than 4G or 5G. If you listen to a song repeatedly, purchase a download to play. Use localized storage rather than cloud-based systems for all of your music and video files. Reduce auto-play, aimless background streaming or using streaming as a sleep aid by changing the default settings on your device including reducing streaming resolution. And turn your camera off for video calls, as carbon emissions are 25 times more than for audio only.
Written by Hussein Boon, Principal Lecturer – Music, University of Westminster
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
