I felt like I explained it.
These comparisons are biased.
And I’m perfectly calm, I listen to vinyl (lots of times).
No, it says directly that they haven’t taken potential increase in streaming into account at all. They say it flat out, bruh
It might be expected that the
increased streaming relative to physical media would be an example
of a rebound effect leading to higher emissions overall. However, this
conclusion cannot be drawn from this analysis, which does not
consider the possibility that increased movie consumption have led to
reduced consumption of other media. This should be the topic of
future analysis.
It’s good science, an analysis of the situation in 2019. Nothing more nothing less.
We are not talking about the same thing. It could well be that all the positive environmental effects of streaming media get nixed because we all consume more media and use more energy after all but thats was completely not my point at all 
I am talking about one simple thing:
a piece of music and how to get it to the customer with as little environmental impact as possible. Please post a serious academic study that shows that producing plastic discs and physically shipping them around the world has less environmental impact than just streaming the same audio information on demand exactly to where it’s need right now.
bonus points if you have a link to the actual paper and not treehugger.com or some other “good science” media outlets 
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But that “simple thing” of yours is irrelevant.
You can’t possibly compare a single stream of 1 album with a single listen, manufacturing and distribution of 1 CD album. This is pointless.
Also because of all the wires in the ocean, the satellites etc their owners need ships and sensors to protect them from possible threats.
We can not even begin to name the things involved to maintain and protect this network
+1 for Imperialist Turnips
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Well if you just decide on extremely narrow conditions where your comparison is correct but that doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening, sure. Buying a CD (or vinyl), shipped from the other side of the world and listening to it once is more wasteful than just streaming said album once. But that’s not what’s really happening, nor how it’s sensible to compare the two technologies, so yeah your point is just irrelevant.
And secondly, if treehugger.com posts their source and it’s an actual study, why not link to them?
We haven’t even talked about how most young people are exposed to music: TikTok and social media. I wonder how that affects the equation?
I think tape lifespan is great, probably why it is used for a lot of archival purposes, I have cassettes 4 decades old which are still fine. For some periods of time they were stored in less than optimal conditions too, in loft/attic and garden shed (although obviously always in boxes and their cases) I still have VHS tapes from the 80’s too, and DATs from the 90’s.
Nah, they’re too unpredictable. Might be fine for decades, might be ruined in less than a decade. Especially DAT is very bad for long term archiving.
I’m only basing on my own experience, of course. Not had a single problem, wish I could say the same for hard drives, lost plenty of those in a much shorter time span, flash memory too. Never lost a CD either aside from a few CDr’s, minidisc also seems very robust, which is strange considering the tech is very similar to CDr, packaging aside.
Ah, right. Well DAT is certainly better than hard drives, but it’s still prone to just failing for no apparent reason. Really tape lasts for 10-30 years if stored in optimum conditions, and even then it can fail randomly. Not really a great format for archiving.
There’s a “new” (10 years old) digital format called M Disk that’s supposed to last for 1000 years, hah. I think it is really the most durable and potential physical format for archiving, but remains to be seen how close it can get to 1000 years.
I guess for a regular person, cloud storage would be the smartest move with added Flash / SSD hard drives with local copies. SSD / Flash memory should last at least 10 years, possibly more if used only for archiving and stored properly.
(Note, I am a librarian so I’ve studied this a bit)
It’s serious business.
Somewhat related: Google and Oracle Cloud Servers Struggle in Heatwave
I wonder if we’ll see subterranean computing farms in the future.
Or subaquatic?
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My new dream job: janitor / guard in a completely automated subaquatic datacenter. Scifi-horror waiting to happen.
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I am enjoy it. I am not the one purposely wanting to use the trash. A new motherboard/cpu combo is not too bad, but what a waste, compared to how long my old build lasted on XP, then Win 7. I converted my old pc to Linux, but audio hardware is lacking the proper driver, that’s all.
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Many people around here defend physical mediums by saying “yeah but phones and computers and the internet network are not sustainable” which is true but also kind of irrelevant. Internet and phones are used by almost everyone and for many other stuff than listening music. If you stop listening to Spotify, you won’t throw away your iPhone as you’ll need it for other stuff, so in the end your carbon footprint will mostly remain the same (save the energy used for streaming). It’s not like people listening to vinyl are not using phones and computers, lol.
Vinyl is niche but it still has an impact, an impact that we could easily avoid if we were willing to renounce to those “beautiful sleeves” and that “sweet analog sound”. 99% of the music cut on vinyl has been digitalized somewhere along the process anyway!
That said it’s completely okay to hold on to unsustainable things. I just think it’s dishonest to claim vinyls are not harmful. I personally think niche stuff like that are quite problematic because everyone is thinking “oh but that’s my hobby, it’s nothing compare to X harmful industry”. But there are millions of small niche like these and I’m sure their environmental impact add up quickly.
Buy used if you can, or better, don’t buy! Probably a good time to mention I still have some stuff available on my Discogs, lol. Okay I’m done<3
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I dont think anyone is claiming that it has no impact. Everything has an impact. Including you eating and farting and making babies. Or use rubber to avoid making babies
I don’t think it’s defending, it’s just pointing out that streaming always needs a device to play back media and is “harmful” just like physical media. People were using discarded physical media and players as example of how wasteful physical media is, while ignoring that we discard our smartphones and computers much faster than cd players or vinyl players or tape decks.
I don’t think anyone has claimed that vinyl isn’t harmful to the enviroment, or that it’s sustainable. The point is, if you want to really want to reduce your carbon footprint, or however you want to put it getting rid of vinyl is completely irrelevant. It won’t solve anything, it’s a fake solution to a real problem. People like to renounce things that are important to them in the name of saving the planet, and those acts feel very impactful because they impact the persons life. In reality usually things like that, like for example not buying new vinyl, is completely useless. It won’t affect anything and it’s just greenwashing really. You feel like you’ve done something without actually having to sacrifice anything substantial.
Start from not eating meat, get rid of your car and stop foreign travel. Lower your home temperature by multiple degrees in the winter. Those things will quickly have an impact if done in a large enough scale, much more than if we got rid of vinyl completely would.
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Honestly, the main reason I haven’t “made it” with music is bcs I care about the environment more than successful artists do, obviously.
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“You will own nothing and be happy”
Summary
The fuck I will, I’m owning stuff and being miserable or happy, or whatever the hell I feel, and I’ll die on that hill.
I’ll also keep stuff for years, and fix things myself, because I’m not a fickle indecisive hollow mind always looking for the new shiny, happiness does not come from owning things of course, but it does not come from not owning anything either, just ask anyone who has been poor.
Interesting to note, those shady fucks still want to own stuff though 
they just want a constant revenue stream from the plebs, many of whom seem only too happy provide for their elite corporate overlords
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Absolutely. I can’t get rid of my car because my city doesn’t have reliable public transportation. It’s simply not a feasible option for me - it’s a 2-hour bus ride vs a 20-minute drive. I’d never cook, enjoy my free time, or see my partner if I took the bus. But I’ve significantly reduced my meat intake, keep my home warmer in the summer than I’d like, and cooler than I’d like in the winter. I vote for politicians who run on platforms that include an emphasis on renewables, expanding public transportation, etc. I also choose to make the “smaller” choices - like buying less physical media, trying to recycle (although in my city, half the recycling gets taken to the dump anyway), picking up trash when I go for a walk, etc.
Do the small choices actually have a measurable impact on the world, especially compared to [insert megacorpororations here]? Almost certainly not, and of course I could do more - but, as @darenager notes above, I also value my happiness now, and so I don’t do any of the things I mentioned above as extremely or as often as I could. My job occasionally requires flying somewhere, which on its own absolutely undoes all my personal efforts.
Also, as a sidenote to the physical vs digital discussion: let’s be realistic here. For the vast majority of people, physical media is something we buy in addition to streaming these days. It isn’t a binary choice, even among hardcore vinyl enthusiasts. Hell, some “collectors” buy albums they never even listen to at all. That’s a straight-up net negative.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that this is all extremely complicated, and we can’t really narrow the discussion down to ‘vinyl bad’ or ‘digital bad.’ The reality is that we can all make our own choices, some more impactful than others, and we all have to weigh whether any given sacrifice or lifestyle change is worth the impact for ourselves. Plus, you know, we need to force corporations to stop treating the earth like a dumpster.
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