Nfs Carbon Playlist
Janise Knollman
You might walk past food carts using propane to grill meat shipped in from across the country, past an art installation of twinkling lights shining bright just because, past corporate-sponsored charging stations that make sure you never have to pocket your phone. Between sets, you could buy a T-shirt that might not last two years before its first hole, churned out in a frenzy of fast fashion, part of a global industry responsible for nearly 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Music festivals are not close to the biggest drivers of global climate change in a modern world built around cars, cheap clothes, shipped foods, and 24/7 connectivity. But most major festivals are an orgy of emissions, and from entrance to exit nearly every choice made favors short-term convenience over long-term sustainability. Today, a zero-emission festival is impossible. But with the help of motivated music fans, carbon neutral festivals are already becoming a reality. So what do they like look? What kind of tradeoffs should fans expect? And what do we get in return?
We spoke with a number of experts in the festival and environmental fields to help answer those questions. There are many possible approaches to carbon neutral music festivals, but they all consider a few key ideas.
Over the past several years, the music industry has been gradually learning how to become more sustainable in the face of global warming. Focus has been rightfully put on large-scale problems like touring and music festivals, but what about the act of listening to music from the comfort of our own homes? Or when we're commuting to work or blasting our favourite tunes at a friend's party?
Musical formats of the past, including vinyl records and CDs, came with more obvious environmental consequences because of the toxic, non-recyclable materials that are used to make them, such as plastics and crude oil. But streaming has emerged with its own invisible threats to the environment.
When you stream a song, our devices access electronic files that are stored on active, cooled servers sitting inside data centres around the world. Beyond the large amounts of energy those centres use, the retrieval and transmission of that information, which is transferred via wifi or the internet, also requires energy. The device you're using to listen to music is another factor, and oftentimes streaming drains your battery at a higher rate.
According to Energy Tracker Asia, an average individual streams approximately five hours of content daily, including non-music content such as film and TV via services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and more. "This results in releasing up to 1.57 million tonnes of CO2 emissions," the article states, "or 0.57 billion tonnes annually." Sharon George, a Keele University lecturer in the department of environmental sustainability, told New Statesman in November 2021 that five hours of streaming was the carbon equivalent of one plastic CD case; 17 hours of streaming equalled one vinyl record.
Those numbers may not sound bad at first when you're thinking about your individual output of carbon emissions, but that same article illustrates just how alarming it really is when you look at it from a collective, global standpoint. New Statesman's own calculated example: "Spotify streams of Olivia Rodrigo's hit single, 'Drivers License,' since January 2021 is greater than flying from London to New York and back 4,000 times, or the annual emissions of 500 people in the U.K."
Of course, these numbers are constantly evolving and rely on some variables. Kyle Devine, a Canadian professor of musicology and author of the 2019 book Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, tells CBC Music that "the internet infrastructure is always changing, which means figures today are out of date tomorrow."
That's a personal preference, as every format has its own environmental impact, and every method offers different sound qualities. Vinyl's resurgence in recent years reignited concerns over its production, so buying secondhand or vintage vinyl could be a more sustainable option. (Companies like Evolution Music in the U.K. are starting to develop ways to create vinyl with renewable and non-fossil fuel materials; last year, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe released a 12" record made of bioplastic.) The same rule applies to CDs and cassette tapes, which have also made a comeback, though on a lesser scale. Streaming is material-free, but requires some mindfulness when it comes to how much, how often and which devices you're using to access streaming services.
Limiting the amount of music you stream is one thing to consider. Given the math above, a good goal is to try and limit the amount of music you stream to fewer than five hours a day. As Laura Marks, a professor at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and co-author of the paper "Streaming Media's Environmental Impact," told Brightly:
"Use fewer devices and keep them for as long as possible! Then, help to curb demand by moderating the time spent streaming, and decreasing resolution. So, basically, changing the habits that have been set in place in the past few years." She also added that streaming on smaller devices such as laptops and phones will emit less CO2 than streaming on a larger device like a TV.
Streaming takes a toll on both the Digital Service Provider (DSP) and the listener's device. The former activates the servers where the songs live, requiring "power, massive cooling systems, internet connectivity, buildings and land," wrote AJR bassist Adam Met in Rolling Stone. Also, listeners use twice the amount of their device's battery life when they stream versus downloading. When you download songs or albums, according to that same Rolling Stone article, there is an 80 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions because it will take less energy to replay. When you stream, you require the same amount of energy every time you hit play.
Downloading music from services also benefits the artist whose music you're listening to, as Met wrote: "It sends a signal to Spotify's algorithm that fans are passionate about the song. If enough people download a specific song, it could help the song show up on playlists like Today's Top Hits. And those playlists are what really drive additional plays (and downloads) on the service."
Devine also notes the rise of NFTs can present a surprising benefit to music listeners, pointing to a company like Serenade that creates digital pressings, essentially "trying to give you the experience of owning a traditional record without owning a record." While Devine says NFTs and blockchain have a deservedly bad reputation, "they're trying to shake that image and do something different, which I find interesting."
In September 2021, Spotify joined the Exponential Roadmap Initiative and the United Nations' Race to Zero, which is a network of companies, scientists and non-governmental organizations committing to halve emissions by 2030. The company has also shifted from traditional data centres to the Google Cloud platform, which Google states is a carbon-neutral platform that intends to power all its data centres with clean energy by 2030. Amazon Web Services, home to services including Apple Music, also powers 65 per cent of its operations with renewable energy.
But even within these partnerships and initiatives, Devine says one of the most important things music listeners can continue to do is push for more transparency from companies, such as how they're improving carbon measures or the labour conditions of their employees. Steps are being taken, but only time will tell if these commitments are fulfilled.
Ever since then, as the warnings have grown more severe, new music has poured into the breach. The unease twanging in our central nervous system hums in every single genre; anywhere you can find an artist trying to respond to the moment rather than escape from it, you can find someone working through deep dread, anger, or grief at the fate of our planet. Songwriters imagine worlds for the children in which carbon continues to snuff out life. Electronic musicians compose elegies for lost species. Pop musicians use it to sound notes of fashionable doom, or to stir up some easy indignation. The sounds have grown more gothic and severe as climate change has started to look a lot less like soft, everyday environmental degradation and more like certain death, barreling down.
Walker chose the years 1800-2300 as his focus, with each minute of music coinciding to another 25 years of human history. The music itself starts simple, elegiac, a few singing lines from strings against low murmurs from the synthesizers. This is the age before industrialized farming, before steam trains. A simple drumbeat starts about 13 minutes in (around the year 1914, the tail end of the Second Industrial Revolution and the explosion of machine-based manufacturing) along with a gentle chug of guitar.
The tougher question, as always, is what all of this music might help us do, if indeed music can help us do anything concrete at all. The link between music and action is as elusive as the one between actions and consequences, or between feeling and doing. Although every activist movement needs some sort of inciting anthem, some sort of glue to help bring common purpose, such pieces of music usually emerge naturally, chosen by people. Music designed for collective action rarely works that way.
Music designed for memorial or grief, however, almost always does. Like music, grief asks nothing of us other than to feel it. The music that taps into these stiller waters tends to plumb deeper, more mysterious emotions that might, in fact, lead us to act out of our own private sense of volition.
Remarkably, Messiaen encountered not only several other renowned musicians within the camp (cellist tienne Pasquier, clarinettist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean Le Boulaire) but also a sympathetic, music-loving German guard named Karl-Albert Brll who furnished Messiaen with writing materials and sequestered him in an empty barracks so he could compose in solitude.