University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine explored the environmental impacts of music consumption from the early generations of vinyl to cassettes and the CD booms to the virtually streaming age. His study estimates the amount of plastic produced to make the physical hardware records has sharply dropped from nearly 61 million kilograms in the 2000s to approximately 8 million kilograms as of 2016. However, the energy consumption for streaming and downloading digital music spiked the greenhouse gas emissions. According to the results, music consumption in the 2000s lead to the emission of roughly 157 million kilograms of greenhouse gas equivalents. Today, the greenhouse gas produced by the energy required to transmit music for streams is estimated to be around 200 to 350 million kilograms.  

According to its 2018 sustainability report, the shift to Google Cloud Platform enabled Spotify to decommission six of its seven data centers and limit the carbon footprint by around 1500 tons. The report additionally deducted that this shift transformed Spotify’s computing platform into almost “100 percent carbon neutral.”

By all accounts, data centers are responsible for around two percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions, which is a carbon footprint almost equivalent to the airline industry. Moreover, music streaming is only one component of the internet, which these data centers control, along with social media, video streaming, and web platforms. Reaching the point where data centers would legitimately run on entirely renewable energy is a vital and massive undertaking. However, it is also only one component of greening the internet.