The burdens and benefits of music streaming

The ecological footprint of boundless choice

My mama done told me (akin to how Johnny Mercer’s mother told him) that, at around the time when Johnny Mercer was recording this chestnut from the war time, she bought a shellac 78 rpm disc of her latest heartthrob from the record shop only for her brother to inadvertently sit on it and split it clean across into exactly two halves. Not only was the disc broken, but so were both mother’s heart and, more to the point, her weekly pocket-money budget.

Nothing daunted, the glue pot was hauled out and, with a sharp eye and a steady hand, the two halves of the disc were duly reunited and, when the glue was dry and with some care, the disc, it did play just as it had before, albeit with the characterful addition of two clicks per revolution of the gramophone turntable. Such are the beauties of mechanical technologies—at least it worked.

Down in my basement, there are about half a dozen plastic crates brimming with records. Not medical records, but LPs and 7” and 12” singles. There must be several hundred, and the more interesting ones have long since been converted into audio files and ripped to my computer. The tracks are all assiduously labelled and identified, each one carrying a suffix to its name: {V}, which means “vinyl”, and warns me that, like my breakfast Ricicles, the track contains a little bit of snap, crackle and pop.

Under the law of copyright, I am allowed to rip these discs onto audio CDs and then to copy them onto my computer for my own, personal listening enjoyment. But it would be illegal for me to share these ripped recordings with other persons outside my household. On YouTube, people nevertheless do something akin to that, and some of them feel the sharp end of a reprimand from an entity like Warner Music Group, so strapped for cash WMG is.

However, people increasingly do not even own the virtual music that they lawfully listen to these days. Instead, they subscribe to a service, like Spotify or Apple Music, which allows them to stream, via their wi-fi network, the tunes and songs that they want. Or even tunes and songs, not that they want but that get chosen for the listener by algorithms which, like the rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, ensure that a fine lady, in Banbury or elsewhere, shall always have music wherever she goes.

Streaming, like the mobile telephone itself, and like the European and North American right-wing politicians enjoying widespread popularity, like pandemics, like smoking bans, like the warring Israeli and Russian states, like the electric vehicle, like the 10,000-20-foot-container cargo ship, like the stagnating worker wage, like the ballooning appetite for narcotics, like the trans-man and -woman, like (to square the circle) Netflix, is something that marks out the latter days of my life from the earlier days of my life. (The only major upset of recent years that restored my existence to where it had begun six decades ago was Brexit, a political hokey-cokey redolent of “you put your left leg in, your left leg out.”)

Of course, if anyone wanted to come round to my home to borrow any of my LPs or singles, then, they’d be most welcome. As long as they returned the disc, they could keep it for as long as they wanted. However, I doubt whether this munificent offer on my part would be taken up, because pretty much everything I own on vinyl is available on either a streaming service or YouTube, the video service. I say pretty much everything, but I bet nobody owns the very first LP that I ever acquired. It was given to me for my fifth birthday by the older brother of a young friend, Michael Mortimer, who was at my party that day in 1966 when the said older came to collect the said younger brother at the conclusion of the festivities. The record recounts a tale that has remained with me my life long and which is exceedingly worthy of the reading, performed on the disc in voice by some of the great actors of the day, including Robert Hardy, and to the accompaniment of wonderful music by Alessandro Scarlatti, played by the Berlin Philharmonia Orchestra: The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. (You can read Collodi’s tale in the original Italian here or it is available in English here. It is quite a different story to the one told by Walt Disney—at the end of chapter four, for instance, Pinocchio hurls a hammer at the Cricket, crushing him dead against the wall; even my record doesn’t tell this children’s story in that level of dark detail).

For the rest, you’d probably not find anything in my vinyl collection that you couldn’t find in some form or another on a streaming service. People stream from these services day and night, in the billions. Stream, upon stream, upon stream of virtual music that has no corporeal form. There can be no question but that, if each of the billions of streams were, instead, a physical carrier of data, like a vinyl disc, the environmental impact of that would be enormous. And the breadth of the musical experience of each listener would, perforce, be much more restricted, to a point such as that experienced by my mother (of having to glue a broken record back together for want of pocket money).

The little black pellets of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) that are melted down to make each vinyl record are still manufactured, mostly in Thailand these days, now that the Keysor-Century Corporation of Santa Clarita, California, has gone out of business. Century produced about a third of all the US’s vinyl for record-making, and the renewed interest in vinyl has created a resurgence in need for the material, which is where a very secretive company called TPC comes in. They are in Thailand, just south of Bangkok. The two plants, Keysor-Century and Thai Plastic and Chemicals, share more than just the final product from their plants: they both pumped, or pump, toxic waste into the surrounding district and waterways. California is now freer from these carcinogens, but they are still freely available in Thailand, by simply bathing in the River Chao Phraya or breathing in, in its vicinity.

The toxins that are a by-product of the manufacture of PVC are rightly targeted by environmentalists as a scourge on Mother Earth. The companies that dump these poisons into rivers or landfills or slag heaps (or wherever it is they dispose of them—they’re not saying, so a certain degree of speculation is required) ought not to be causing such pollution in their environs: Saugus, CA (the district of Santa Clarita where Keyson-Century had their plant) is now a healthier place in which to be than back in the period 1958-76, when vinyl was all the rage; Rayong, THA, marginally less so.

Upon reading all this one might be tempted to want to bid good riddance to the days of physical data carriers like LPs (and, for what it’s worth, CDs, DVDs, cassette tapes, floppy disks, 3½” floppies, and so forth, all of which had (or in my antiquated case, have) considerable PVC content). Certainly, the demise of the LP has made moving student flats a less cumbersome process than it was in my university days (my brother, if he’s reading this, may well feel a twinge in his vertebra as he casts his mind back to Randolph Crescent’s five flights of stairs in 1981). Music, not to dwell overly on the other remote services we avail ourselves of these days, is now available in copious abundance at the scroll of a playlist, and we may lull ourselves into some sense of sanctity that, in so doing, we do not burden the planet with heaps of vinyl, plastic, toxins and, ultimately (except in the case of my basement) landfill waste. And there, you would be wrong.

Sustainable pop singer Billie Eilish has lashed out at fellow performers for producing multiple variants of their vinyl offerings in order to cash in on the collectibles market (among them, The Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift). Her own collectibles variants are indeed manufactured out of recycled product and sugar (for the packaging). But, that aside, the toxins produced by all the records ever made since the 1910s are by far outstripped by the pollution created by the simple process of streaming itself. It is not a single stream by a single listener that is the problem; it is the billions of streams every day of the year by a huge proportion of the world’s population that creates the pollution. The modern teeny-bopper’s thirst for choice and background accompaniment even as they jaunt down the street and the personal space soundtracks that their adult compatriots yearn for in every free moment of the day: it is they that keep the servers churning to produce all this remote entertainment. Just as with the smoky old banger in the high street, which looks so deleterious for the environment alongside its electric counterpart, truth is that the two vehicles both produce around the same amount of pollution, only the one vehicle produces its filth at a distance from the town centre, and yet is not even as recyclable at the end of its lifespan as the smoky old banger.

This 2020 article in the Guardian by Kyle Devine says it succinctly:

Although digital audio files seem virtual, they rely on infrastructures of data storage, processing and transmission that have potentially higher greenhouse gas emissions than the petrochemical plastics used in the production of more obviously physical formats such as LPs—to stream music is to burn coal, uranium and gas.

The amount of energy required to stream an individual song or album is negligible—much less than it takes to get that same music on an LP, cassette or CD—but one-to-one comparisons miss the point. We need to understand the aggregate energy effects of billions of streamers who now expect, without a second thought, instant access to unlimited amounts of music. This culture of listening is what gives us the result that, although the US recording industry is using far less plastic, it is producing more greenhouse gas emissions. Conservative estimates show the amount of such emissions to be 200m kilos a year after 2015, while pessimistic estimates show it to be 350m kilos a year – which is more than double the US industry’s emissions profile at the height of vinyl, cassettes or CDs. Individual digital audio files use less energy than those previous formats. Those individual gains in efficiency are outstripped by increases in overall use.

I used to own three cars. One, I bought from an American who was being deported from Belgium, as a favour to help him pay his legal fees. Another was bought for a partner whom I divorced for cheating, but I kept the car to help ungrateful theatre groups move their decor and props. They were all useful to a degree, but, in the end, I can only drive one car at a time. Now, I know that we cannot be music lovers and still only ever listen to one piece of music. That said, the director of the Scottish National Orchestra once told me, “If you’ve heard one Vivaldi concerto, you’ve heard them all,” so just imagine if you’d been collecting records in the time of Antonio. (It’d have been a bit like collecting Modern Talking records, or Philip Glass.)

The point is that a wide array of wi-fi’ed music and its constant streaming constitute a luxury that, unlike yellowfin tuna and wagyu beef, is less obvious in terms of its ecological burden, but which we nonetheless could in fact easily live without. If the objection to that is that up-and-coming musicians would then have no outlet for their talent (like my nephew, who can be explored here), then young music-makers are still not well served by the streaming services, given the paltry sums that feed through to them after the streaming websites and their publishers have all taken their considerable whacks.

Streaming is controversial, but the arguments are not always clear-cut, especially to those who consume the service. A wide variety of industry views can be read in this Guardian article. I, for myself, tend to stick to my own collection and occasionally venture into a free service like YouTube to discover new things. I like the music that I have learned to like, over a half-century and more, since I acquired that LP of Collodi’s Pinocchio. I can be happy with that; and much of it, including Pinocchio, still moves me greatly, which is ultimately what music is all about.

Streaming is a highly profitable business, which is why Apple cynically split its Music offering off from its iTunes software, to discourage iTune collections and promote our tune streaming. It is very profitable for the big tech leviathans. But it places a huge burden on the environment, make no mistake. And it certainly doesn’t benefit musicians to half the extent that the traditional payer of 6c each (as Jimmy Stewart tells his screen father in The Glenn Miller Story) would contribute to the coffers of performing artists when buying records. In another recent Guardian article, Damon Krukowski rightly asks: How are musicians supposed to survive on $0.00173 per stream?

That’s the irony: the technology that makes your listening life so easy in fact surreptitiously pollutes the world we live in while profiting middlemen (who, by now, have considerably less promotional heavy lifting to do than in the days of vinyl recordings) to a far greater extent than the authors of the works that you so laud and praise in exultation.

It’s Easter, time for some lauding and praising in exultation. Inneggiamo, il Signor non è morto!