Taylor Swift’s Spotify streams have the same carbon emissions as 20,000 households, claims new reportDo you think about the carbon footprint of your music streaming? Without a physical product, plastic CD cases, vinyl or the notoriously hard to recycle shrink wrap it comes in, it’s easy to assume that streaming would be more environmentally friendly than physical music.
However, this is actually not the case. Storing and processing music in the cloud is reliant on on vast data centres which use huge amounts of resources and energy. Now, a new report has shed light on just how big the carbon footprint of streaming music is.

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The report, conducted by Utilities Now, breaks down the energy impact of music streaming across genres and artists. To estimate the carbon footprint associated with numerous high-profile artists’ music, researchers considered the total number of streams on Spotify, the average duration of a song (in hours), the energy consumption rate for music streaming per hour (0.055 kg CO2) and the average carbon intensity of electricity (0.385 kg CO2 per kWh).
It’s perhaps not a surprise given how popular she is that Taylor Swift was found to have racked up the greatest carbon footprint through streams of her music. Her total streams have generated 127.9 million kg of CO2, equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of over 20,100 households or driving 319.8 million miles in an average passenger vehicle.

Drake ranks second, with a carbon footprint of 106.2 million kg CO2, closely followed by Bad Bunny at 97.5 million. Rounding out the top five are The Weeknd with 84.5 million kg of CO2 and Ed Sheeran with 70.3 million. The other artists in the top 10 are Eminem, Ariana Grande, Kanye West, Justin Bieber and Coldplay.
The report also compared the carbon footprint of different genres of music. Latin and pop were found to have the highest average energy impact, while electronic and metal had significantly lower ones.
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