[Correspondence] Album vs Streaming, which is more eco-friendly?

Have you ever imagined life without music?

Whether we go to school or work, or focus on our studies and work, music is always with us.

Perhaps music and our lives are inseparable.

Actually, I am writing this article while listening to music.

In particular, more passionate fans buy albums and collect goods related to their favorite singers.

But recently, I heard that a lot of albums are being thrown away.

If you search the Internet community right now, there are a lot of people who are thinking about how to handle the albums piled up at home.

It would all be garbage.

So today, we are going to look at the impact of the music market on the environment with data.

Not only CDs, but also LPs that have been revived and recently streamed.

This is the question Mabu News asks its readers today.

"Albums and streaming, which is greener?"

Efforts to get a photocard

I ordered 30 albums to get a photocard of my favorite member who was

excited about the comeback of my favorite idol .

As the number of album purchases increases, the possibility of going to a fan signing event increases.

The limited edition LP was also taken care of.

Kokko has entered a full-fledged album gang.

1, 2, 3...

Kokko's pupils shake at the photocards of other members that appear one after another.

Kakko, who has released all albums.

I order 20 albums again.

Are there any idols who are like Kokko?

It's understandable that when you find a favorite idol, you want to collect related goods as well!

However, since the photocards are randomly included in the album, you have to buy a lot of albums to get the photocards of the members you like.

Fan signing events are similar.

You can get one ticket for a fan signing event for each album.

If you want to go to a fan signing event, you need to buy a lot of albums.

The amount of album purchases that can go to a fan signing event stably, so-called fan cuts are even being said.

Except for one album for listening to music, dozens of other albums will all be garbage.

To be honest, I don't listen to music on CDs, so it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the whole album is actually garbage.

How big will it be?

Looking at the album sales in Korea, the number of albums in the top 400 sales for the year last year was a whopping 57,089,160 copies.

It is larger than our population.

CDs are made from a plastic called polycarbonate, which takes a million years to decompose in landfills.

It is virtually non-decomposable.

As a result, CDs must be disposed of in landfills or incinerators.

However, in polycarbonate, plasticizers, which are the main culprits of environmental hormones, are included in the manufacturing process.

So, a huge amount of toxic gas is generated during the incineration process.

What if this includes vinyl for the album packaging and other accessories included in the album?

It can be said that the environmental burden caused by album sales is considerable.

The same goes for LPs that Kokko bought as a limited edition.

These days, there are no records called vinyl, so I couldn't sell them.

When it is released as a limited edition, fans buy too much, and the sold-out procession is basic, and there are many cases where it is resold at a higher price.

The LP trend is not limited to Korea.

The graph above is a graph showing record sales in the United States. For the first time since 1986, LP sales surpassed CD sales.

It really deserves to be called the second heyday of LP.

However, the plastic used to make this LP is famous for being of very poor quality.

It is PVC, and vinyl chloride, the main raw material of PVC, is a class 1 carcinogen designated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (WHO).

Like CD, LP also generates large amounts of toxic gases and environmental hormones when incinerated.

As album sales increase, the amount of plastic discarded will inevitably increase.

dance with plastic

From LPs to Cassettes and CDs...

As the times progressed, the form of albums changed little by little, and consumption changed accordingly.

As shown in the graph above, the era of the LP passed and the cassette came to mind, and the CD appeared, and it overwhelms all other albums.

In line with that, our consumption has taken place, and a lot of the plastic used to make records is thrown away as waste.

How big is it?

There is a data jointly studied by the University of Glasgow in the UK and the University of Oslo in Norway.

We analyzed the music market to see how much environmental cost music consumption caused, and Mabu News drew a graph with this data.

The timing was based on the peak of each album.

First, let's look at the peak of LP sales in the United States in 1977.

At this time, a whopping 57,884 tons of plastic used in the music market.

Of those, 71.3% came from LPs.

If you include LP singles containing only 1 to 3 songs, the ratio rises to 95.1%.

The amount of plastic emitted from the record market in 1988 was 55,544 tons, a decrease from 1977.

At this time, cassettes were at their peak, accounting for 64% of the total.

Twelve years later, in 2000, CDs overtook all other media.

In 2000 alone, 61,096 tons of plastic were produced, of which 89.4% were CDs.

Now, as most of our music consumption comes from streaming and downloading, our plastic emissions have plummeted.

In 2021, 7,487 tons of plastic were emitted, which is 12.3% of the level in 2000.

It's not just the album.

Concerts and festivals cannot avoid environmental pollution.

The Coachella Festival is said to be the largest music festival in the United States, and it alone generates 1,612 tons of waste annually.

During the festival, 107 tons of waste are thrown out per day.

However, only 20% of this is recycled.

The UK, home to the world's largest rock festival, Glastonbury, is even worse.

If you count only the festivals held in the summer, 23,500 tons of waste are generated every year.

All the festivals have been canceled in the past two years due to the corona virus, but if they are held again this year, a huge amount of garbage can be poured out again.

Pollution hidden in streaming

The virtue doesn't end with the album.

This time, I play music all day long enough to warm up the computer (+ smartphone).

To raise my idol's rank in the music room I have every week, this much effort is gum.

Streaming, downloading, and even the number of views of YouTube MVs...

We work hard for idols.

These days, the virtues do not end with albums and goods.

As streaming and music videos affect the music broadcast rankings, fans cannot miss the music rankings and video views.

Most people, not just idol fans, will listen to music streaming or watch it on YouTube when they listen to it.

As mentioned above, existing albums have to be made of plastic, so there is a waste problem, but streaming doesn't have any real things, so you can think that there is nothing to pollute the environment.

They say that technology protects the environment.

But in fact, that's not the case.

Because even when streaming or watching videos on YouTube, carbon is emitted.

Let's start with the principle of streaming where carbon is emitted.

The music files we listen to streaming are stored in corporate data centers.

When we search for music with our smartphone, the music files in the data center are transmitted to the router, which is a relay device, through the network, and when the router sends the files to the smartphone via Wi-Fi, we can only hear the music.

However, it takes a lot of power to operate facilities such as data centers, routers, and Wi-Fi.

And when electricity is produced, carbon is emitted.

In 2000, when CD peaked, the greenhouse gas emissions from music were 157,633 tons.

However, in 2016, 205,607 tons of greenhouse gases were generated, much more than that.

As the number of streaming and downloading music has increased, companies have increased servers and increased download and streaming speeds.

The huge amount of electricity used in the music industry is actually emitting more carbon than in the past.

It is estimated that annual greenhouse gas emissions from subscription services such as Spotify and Apple Music are between 200,000 and 350,000 tons.

The figure in 2021 will be much higher than that in 2016, as music fans who could not go to concerts even though they wanted to go to a concert during the Corona crisis relieved their disappointment with streaming services.

Not only music, but also using other internet services also generates greenhouse gases.

At least 72mg of carbon dioxide was emitted just by reading this article right now.

Numerous IT devices, including the Internet and computers, emit carbon not only at the network level, but also in all processes.

We call this our digital carbon footprint.

No matter how many people digitally use, how much carbon emission would be...

It may be underestimated, but the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the electricity consumed by data centers and data transmission networks worldwide accounts for 2% of global electricity demand.

This is comparable to the amount of electricity used by the global aviation industry.

Q. How do you calculate the carbon dioxide generated by reading articles?

Three pieces of data are required.

Multiplying these three numbers gives you the calculation.

First, calculate the amount of data in this article, multiply by the average value of electrical energy consumed to transmit data (Joshua Aslan, 2017), and multiply by the national average value provided by KEPCO to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide emitted compared to power consumption If you do, you're done.

If you look at the amount of data up to the upper part, the text is 7,380Byte and the picture is 2,817,000Byte.

If you add it up, it will be 2,824,380 Bytes... If you multiply this by the average electrical energy consumed for 1 Byte of data transmission of 0.00000000006 Kwh/Byte and multiply the amount of carbon dioxide emitted compared to power consumption by 424 gCO2/kwh?

0.072gCO2!

That is, it can be estimated that 72 mg of carbon dioxide was generated.

There is no music on a dead planet

When you buy an album, you get plastic, and when you stream, you get carbon...

It is truly a dilemma.

The music world is moving to overcome this situation.

Labels that produce sustainable LPs are emerging one after another overseas.

A label in the UK is making LPs that can be recycled.

Some indie labels also declared that they would reduce their carbon footprint by 50%.

Singers are also speaking out for the environment.

When Coldplay promoted their 2019 album <Everyday Life>, they announced that they would not go on tour unless carbon neutrality was guaranteed.

Recently, they even made a dance floor that generates electricity on their own.

Power is generated only when fans run in the arena, so that the lights on the stage are turned on, and so on.

Billie Eilish plans to ban straws and eliminate single-use water bottles in her concert halls.

Spectators must bring water bottles to enjoy Billie Eilish's performance.

Billie Eilish even performed in clothes that read "No Music On A Dead Planet".

Streaming companies are not standing still.

Spotify had 7 data centers and operated servers in the past, but they closed all data centers in the United States and replaced them with Google Cloud Platform, which runs on renewable energy.

It is a bold choice to reduce carbon emissions.

However, although cloud companies are talking externally that they use renewable energy to power their data centers, there are many places that still use fossil fuels, which is why they are being criticized.

What is the status of K-pop?

So, what kind of effort is K-pop doing?

K-pop is growing day by day.

Even if you are not an idol fan, you can feel the change in the status of K-pop through your skin.

Last year, Korea's record exports were $220.84 million.

A whopping 262.4 billion won in Korean money!

In 2017, it was $44.18 million, and in just five years, it nearly fivefolded.

The growth of K-pop can also be seen through domestic album sales.

For a while, it was difficult to see album sales of over 1 million copies in the music market.

Based on the Gaon Chart, 1 million albums appeared in 2017 after a long time, and 11 albums recorded more than 1 million copies this year.

But it's hard to see this as a healthy sales figure.

The record structure in Korea encourages people to purchase more albums for goods or fan signing events.

There are a lot of fans who throw away the album as soon as they buy it, so the store makes room for it to be thrown away altogether.

Fans are moving first to change the weirdly twisted K-pop music market.

There is an organization called KPOP 4 Planet, created by Indonesian EXO fan Nurul Sarifah.

In this group, K-pop fans are giving their voice to the album makers so that they can do their job comfortably while protecting the environment.

By collecting albums that fans have been forced to purchase to buy goods, and sending them to the agency.

Also, some people raise their voices that the concert to be held in 2022 should be an eco-friendly concert.

Please use green energy and not use single-use plastics.

After listening to the fans' voices, some agencies and singers are releasing albums made of eco-friendly materials, but structural changes still have a long way to go.

This is the article prepared by Mabu News today.

In today's article, we looked at how the music we listen to affects the environment with data.

What kind of stance do you think K-pop should take toward eco-friendly culture?

And who should act first to foster a green culture?

Is it an entertainment company or an artist?

Or is it the fans?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks for reading the long article.

(*This article is an edited article from the Witchcraft Newsletter)

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: Hye-Min Ahn

: Jun -Seok Ahn

: Su-Min Kang, Dong-Yong Kang