Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 19, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
From an environmental-protection perspective, downloading music from the internet makes substantially more sense than purchasing conventional audio CDs. A recently published report by a joint research group from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Stanford University in California, financed by Microsoft and Intel, shows that purchasing an album digitally can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by up to 40 percent compared with a traditional physical purchase. If the downloaded music is not burned to CD after purchase and then placed on a shelf in a plastic case, this difference grows to as much as 80 percent.
According to the researchers involved, the decisive factor behind the enormous difference in environmental compatibility between the two forms of obtaining music is primarily that a CD is generally subject to a relatively elaborate production and delivery process. This is eliminated from the outset with a download, making it a substantially more environmentally friendly form of distribution than conventional physical-media sales. “The tactile qualities and aesthetics of the CD, the uncompressed song quality, and additional features such as booklets, lyrics or photographs of the artists continue to be valued by many music consumers. The passion for collecting also plays a role. Many music fans simply want to have the CDs of their favorite artists on the shelf. Deriving an environmental-protection problem from this seems a little grotesque to me,” IFPI spokesman Thomas Böhm told pressetext. “From such a standpoint, there should no longer be any physically existing products at all,” Böhm points out.
“The finding uncovered here is not unimportant. In my opinion, however, one should keep things in perspective and, instead of trying to make music downloads appealing to consumers, motivate people to question their own shopping habits,” Claudia Sprinz, consumer spokeswoman at Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, explained in response to an inquiry from the pressetext.de news service. If someone is interested in ecological music consumption, they should first clarify the purposes for which they are acquiring the music. “For chart hits that only interest someone for two or three weeks, for example, it is not necessarily necessary to buy a CD. A download is certainly more sustainable here,” Sprinz explains. Overall, however, the IT companies that financed the current report should concentrate more on the environmental compatibility and longevity of their own products than on promoting music downloads.
As a comparison scenario, the US research team defined a purchase in which a consumer orders a CD online and has it delivered home by truck. Various alternatives were also examined, involving express delivery by airplane or collection from a specialist music store in the consumer’s own car. But the result always remained the same: carbon-dioxide emissions are substantially higher here than for music downloads. Only if the consumer concerned made the effort to walk to the store to purchase the desired album could traditional and digital acquisition reach “almost the same level” in terms of emissions. At the same time, however, the researchers note that the environmental advantage can very quickly be offset with larger data transfers because of the higher energy consumption required for such downloads.