How Digital Music Can Fight Climate Change

But a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University, including longtime IT energy researcher Jonathan Koomey, have concluded that yep, in general buying digital music reduces the energy and CO2 emissions of delivering the music by between 40 and 80 percent compared with traditional CD distribution methods. That’s despite the additional energy used to download the music via the Internet, and thus the group concludes that “[O]nline delivery is clearly superior from an energy and CO2 perspective.”