Fans demand streaming giants go renewable

Today, environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) is a hot topic, even in the K-pop industry. Giant K-pop labels like JYP and SM added their voices recently to the growing chain of sustainable business announcements. More have already experimented with digital albums as an alternative to traditional releases following criticism of the amount of plastic waste resulting from fans’ bulk buying — the recent solo album of BTS member J-Hope was a great example. As a K-pop fan concerned about the climate crisis, that event was very encouraging.

But there is a much bigger and more worrying problem than a physical album and what it is made of: longterm carbon emissions from music streaming.

How music streaming affects the climate crisis is less obvious than plastic waste, and it is less known about. The internet infrastructure we use to listen to music online — from streaming companies’ data centers to our personal digital devices —consumes considerable energy. For instance, Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” the most-streamed song on Spotify, has contributed an estimated 11,086 tons of related CO2 emissions, equal to driving a gasoline-powered car around the planet 1,105 times. That’s just one song.

The climate impact of music streaming is especially crucial to K-pop fans since we tend to stream our favorite artists much more than casual listeners. Where the average music consumer listens to music about two hours a day, more than 60 percent of the 1,097 K-pop fans who took part in our KPOP4PLANET survey said they stream their favorite artists’ music for more than five hours a day.

When we look closely at these numbers, it becomes clear the streaming problem is much bigger than plastic waste from physical albums. According to research, listening to music digitally for five hours or longer emits more CO2 than the manufacture of a physical CD. This means that even if a listener got 10 store-bought albums in one go, their streaming activity would start to emit more CO2 after 10 days of digital listening.

The solution is not to stop listening to music. It’s much more realistic than that. We ask, what if streaming platforms run their data centers solely on renewable energies? And the answer is simple. Melon, South Korea’s No.1 music streaming platform, is estimated to have emitted more than 200,000 tonnes of CO2 last year — Melon would cut these emissions year after year by going 100 percent renewable.

Global platforms have already proven that running on renewables is possible. Today, Apple powers all of its data centers with renewables, and Spotify publicly releases its climate action reports annually to share its own energy transition progress.

K-pop fans want South Korea to follow these practices. More than 70 percent of our survey respondents are willing to move to a greener alternative. And they don’t just talk about it, they are willing to act to be heard.