Assessing The Environmental Cost of the Record Business

Posted by Justin Boland on Feb 29, 2008 | 0 Comments

Exclaim!, the long-running and very much badass Canadian music magazine, recently published an article, How to Save the Planet (One Gig at a Time).  I read articles I disagree with several times a day, but I think this is one worth exploring, because it’s a good gateway to every single issue this article is going to touch on. 

Let’s start with the first paragraph of the article:

A recent report in the U.K. Guardian claims that one million unsold copies of Robbie Williams’ last CD Rudebox will be shipped to China to be crushed (and hopefully used for road-surfacing). Dealing with product waste like this reportedly costs EMI millions of dollars a year.

Nobody in China is That Stupid

Aside from imperial wars and Wall Street arrogance, there’s another reason the US is losing it’s superpower status to China: they’re really good at making money. I would suggest that it’s very naive to think 1 million unopened copies of a western pop album will get destroyed when they could simply get sold. They’re worth more as CDs than they are as small, granular chunks of crushed plastic.

Piracy and theft are the bedrock foundation of the Chinese economy, and this extends from technology to clothing to the record stores.  For anyone who missed it, a great author named Ed Peto recently gave an incredible analysis of the music industry in China for UK website The Register.

The arrival of western product in the early 90s came courtesy of “saw-gashed’ CDs: Excess stock and deleted titles from western majors attempting to avoid taxation and disposal costs. These CDs had their cases cut to mark them as defective and were then shipped in to China through free-market economic ports like Guangzhou, only to end up on the black market. An end result that can be seen as a partial “shooting-in-the-foot’ for the western majors who then had to come in and fight against the pirate networks they inadvertently helped set up.

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Don’t Get Me Wrong

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Now, musicians are some of the most disorganized people I know. You have to badger them for the rehearsal space rent. Who knows where their copy of the record deal is, let alone all those gas receipts at tax time. Hell, half of them barely remember to bring a guitar pick to a gig.

Makes me glad I do hip hop.

Thinking back to when I played bass and thought I was a punk singer, though, I have to disagree.  I’ve played in bands more or less non-stop since I was just getting used to high school, and perhaps I’m just lucky.  The musicians I have known and worked with have been driven, creative, and very successful people.  In fact, most of them inspired me to get my ass organized, focused and professional. 

Now, doing hip hop, I’m meeting rappers who know more about the demographics of hip hop than major label executives do.  Everywhere I go, I keep crossing paths with young men and women who put in 18 hour days, for months on end.  Hip hop right now is like Silicon Valley in the early 90s.  I don’t think that’s hyperbole-just look at where all of the innovation in the music industry has been coming from.  The most aggressive and experimental entrepreneurs in the industry are working in hip hop.  Everyone else is just taking notes.

What is the Scope of the Problem?

Even if “destroyed” CDs in China wind up back on the market, I’m not denying people throw out CDs.  I’ve junked several thousand myself. 

It’s hard to find precise figures about the environmental cost of CD manufacturing.  (Shocker.) I did find a few general facts from the very helpful (and nicely designed) CD Recycling Center:

In 1983, when CDs were introduced in the United States, 800,000 discs were sold. By 1990, this number had grown to close to 1 billion!

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Will the Problem Solve Itself?

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IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Then again…check out today’s Listening Post coverage of the Digital Music Forum East conference.  Thomas Hesse, from Sony/BMG:

I have an upbeat view on physical.  I don’t think the CD is dead at all.  It’s a different shift, CD to digital than vinyl to CD, which was a clean break.  In today’s world, not everyone is going online.  70 percent of US online.  75 percent in a few years.  Online penetration growth is small.  How is this 30 percent that is offline going to get music?  We have some physical retailers who are excited about the contraction, and growing their business in a meaningful way.

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Are you operating on the assumption that the CD will remain an important format?

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THE BOTTOM LINE IS LOCATED INSIDE YOUR WALLET

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…we put our heads together and worked on whether maybe, just maybe, there’s a way to make use of the millions and millions of water and soda bottles that are thrown out every day by consumers. After brainstorming together we zeroed in on a new way to create a Digipak tray out of nothing other than bottles that were being destined for the landfill or incinerator.

One Last Question

I wrote this simply because it interested me and I chose to pursue it.  I’m also tempted to work on an article examining what I didn’t cover here-namely, the environmental impact of touring. More importantly, though, I don’t want to be self-indulgent.  I want to know what the Audible Hype readers think about this-is this a line of inquiry you care about, or was this wandering down the wrong alley?  Thanks in advance, folks…and as always, thank you for your time.