Going green forces you to audit your life, for while there are some obvious things you can do to make a difference – walk rather than drive, recycle your papers, turn down the thermostat and so on – it’s the little things that you often miss out on.
And so I’ve been thinking a lot about music.
I don’t listen to CDs any more. Most of my aural stimulation comes courtesy of the BBC (Radio 4, Radio 2 or my local station for the travel news), but even when I do want to listen to something I’ve bought the CDs never get a look-in. Why? Because they’re neatly packed away in a box in the loft, and haven’t been out for months. In some cases years, if they’re particularly old.
That’s because they’ve all been ripped to an iTunes server, which gives me access to every track on every CD from any machine on my network. I switch it off when it’s not in use, of course, and it’s hosted on an old, salvaged machine that would otherwise have ended up in landfill until I picked it off the tip pile at work. But despite these two ticks in my favour, I’m still not sure how ‘green’ a solution this is.
The server gobbles up far more power than a regular CD player, and by buying all those CDs, which are now never used, I’ve contributed enormously to the pile of industrial by-products that would undoubtedly have been pumped out at the very same time.
At least I’m not turfing them out and doubling the waste.
In the earliest days of CD production there was no alternative but today, with the iTunes Store, eMusic and the like offering a far wider and more convenient buying choice than the high street, there’s no excuse to buy music on physical media any more.
This is also one area where it’s actually cheaper to go green, as iTunes albums top out at £7.99, compared to almost twice that much in some shops. The trouble, though, is I just don’t like buying my music that way. I want a physical CD. As backup.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) ties purchased music to the buyer, so unless I want to put them on an iPod or burn them to CD (again, wasteful) only my computer or four others on the same network can play the tracks I buy from iTunes. So what happens if (unlikely, I know) the DRM-controlling-authority, in this case Apple, either goes out of business or changes the terms of use for that music?
If it does, I might find myself with an expensive pile of utterly useless data, and those three BBC stations I listen to each day may end up being my only choice of entertainment rather than simply my preferred choice.
A dilemma, eh?
It’s the little things, as I say, that can make going green tricky.
Related posts:
