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As Spotify moves to video, the environmental footprint of music streaming hits the high notes
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Lol no I won't.
What a stupid, bizarre and illogical article. It clearly shows that the key is in moving to renewables yet it still argues for the users also doing this sort of tiny useless gestures. I suspect it's AI-written at least in part.
The devices they're talking about are also still turned on. The power usage of the network requests is incredibly small. Switching from cellular to wifi will make the biggest difference, but who the hell isn't already on their home wifi network? Plus, at least me personally, I have my liked songs downloaded on Spotify to save data usage. I suspect others may as well.
This is like the folks worrying about the water usage of AI. Environmental concerns are a real problem and there are tons of things to focus on, but they pick such a weirdly specific, negligible, non-issue.
This is good advice tho. I also chose to read it as a Spotify endorsement of the high seas ;)
You do realize that it's harder to move to renewables if the energy required keeps increasing? Higher bandwidth usage requires expansion of internet infrastructure to account for peak usage which increases the amount of energy used, not only for the manufactured hardware (which will likely turn to e-waste at some point) but also to keep the infrastructure running. I highly recommend reading research about the sustainability of the internet.
No, since the article doesn't mention anything of that sort. I really, really doubt that in the world of crypto mining and AI training the average people streaming some music and music videos will make a substantial difference. Your degrowth-oriented approach sounds like it would just solidify the already highly monopolised market, as any new players or innovation can be met with the "wastes too much bandwidth" hammer, as is this new service by Spotify right here.
This is the first article that I get on Google. Now, as they say, "I ain't reading all that" (I probably wouldn't understand most of it), but I did take a look at the abstract:
Sounds good to me! With no mention of having to limit our internet usage.
And if reducing bandwidth waste really were that important, it would have go both ways anyway, with the providers optimising their content (probably forced to do so by regulations in some way).
You don't have the power to decarbonize all electricity or to create and enforce laws to reduce the rate of e-waste. Until this changes, you have the power to limit your bandwidth usage, which is something that would result in less e-waste and less energy usage (and inherently less carbon emissions since all electricity isn't decarbonized). You're essentially saying "the paper says you can fix the problem in the future so I don't give a fuck about the problem now", which is not very bright.
My god. This might be the most naive thing I've ever read. This would be like saying "if carbon emissions were really that bad, oil and coal would be illegal". Guess what? The climate will be (and has already been) irreversibly damaged if we don't drastically reduce the amount of carbon fuel being used and no regulations have successfully come close to getting the necessary drastic reduction. Turns out everything that's bad doesn't magically get solved by regulations, especially when rich companies which rely on e.g. carbon fuel and bandwidth have major influence over politics due to their massive amount of resources.
From the article:
This is a massive difference, and clearly doable, nothing that would be limited to the distant future.
So I get this right? I'm naive for expecting govt regulations to put companies' behaviour under control, whereas you're realistic by expecting hundreds of millions of people deciding to systematically minimise their Youtube/Tiktok/Spotify/Netflix/Zoom usage? Hmm, alright.
And yet in an another comment you also expect that Spotify shouldn't introduce video streaming, without any external regulation but out of pure goodness of their hearts?