How to reduce your digital footprint as a music industry pro

When we speak of reducing our carbon footprint, we usually think of finding travel alternatives to cars and planes, cutting down on fast fashion and re-thinking our diets. Rarely do we consider the impact our digital technologies have on the environment.

And yet various studies estimate the digital industry’s carbon emissions to be between 2.3 and 3.7 percent of global CO₂ emissions, equivalent to the emissions of the entire aviation industry (Source: My Climate, Tech Business News). It is projected that by 2040, the emissions coming from the Information & Communication Technology sector will be as large as 14% of what the entire world emitted in 2016. Therefore, as we step into an increasingly digitized society, it’s crucial that we become mindful of our waste in digital spaces, just as much as in the natural world.

With file storage and sharing being a major source of electricity consumption in data centers, Bridge.audio offers a solution that enables you to store and share your audio files more efficiently, thus reducing your digital footprint and increasing your productivity all at once. Let’s take a look at the difference Bridge.audio can make on your digital footprint, as a music industry professional.

Your digital footprint before Bridge.audio

Any musical professional knows that before getting to a final product, a project must be sent back and forth multiple times to multiple people. Demos, V1s, V2s… we’ve all seen how many files get created and exchanged around merely one track. Despite the ease with which our digital technologies have allowed us to create multiple files, the more we multiply storage locations and the greater the number of transfers we make to each other, the more energy-intensive our digital behavior is, and the more considerable the environmental cost.

For example, let’s take a look at the impact of working with a 100MB master file (.WAV or .FLAC) : Storing it for one year in a cloud creates a carbon footprint of on average 262.8g of CO2.

When a file is sent by email, because of its size (>20MB), it is hosted on the cloud and remains there until deleted by the sender or recipient. Each new contributor represents a new storage location.

During the creation phase of the song, several versions of the file may be sent, creating even more storage locations across multiple devices for the same track. When using platforms like weTransfer or Google Drive, links can expire and old audio files can lose their relevance, hence new links are sent with new files by email, which typically has a carbon footprint of about 0.2g of CO2.

Oftentimes in the music industry, the audio file is accompanied by a press kit consisting of high-quality photos, videos, PDFs and more, increasing the weight of the email to about 50MB. Once online, the audio file has a carbon footprint averaging 131.4g of CO2.

On average, a music project involves the creation of 5 separate files in its creation phase, exchanged between 2 contributors. The final file is shared on average between 10 contributors (10 storage locations) who exchange around a hundred emails in total.

In the historical functioning of the industry, without Bridge.audio, the carbon footprint of file hosting and exchanges for the creation of a song amounts to 5600g of CO2, equivalent to a 25 km car journey.

Your digital footprint after Bridge.audio

With Bridge.audio, the file is hosted online on a singular platform that can be accessed by multiple people, where all edits and modifications are updated instantaneously for all without having to send any new links.

The platform can accommodate any audio file, as well as high-quality photos and PDFs. Moreover, each Bridge project can be sent with a personalized link that never expires, but whose access can be modified at any point, a link that also enables users to be notified when their track has been opened, streamed and downloaded.

What’s more, Bridge also has a strict deduplication policy that prevents anyone from uploading the same title multiple times, and audio files can be replaced within a project in one click. For example, users are able to replace their V1 demo file with the V2 demo file without having to create a new track and send a new link.

Assuming the file, in addition to being uploaded to Bridge, is stored by the producer (for backup) and the digital distributor, we can estimate that with Bridge.audio, the carbon footprint of file hosting and exchanges for the creation of a song amounts to 363g of CO2, about 15 times less than using other non-adapted digital tools or exclusively using emails.

Conclusion

Though the digital world offers a great deal of promise and opportunity for music industry professionals, it’s important not to underestimate the impact of our online footprint. At Bridge, we sought to create a product that would both simplify your collaborations and enhance your productivity, all while reducing your digital footprint. Pretty good deal if you ask us…

Find out more about how Bridge compares to tools such as WeTransfer, Google Drive, Soundcloud & Dropbox?

Ready to try it out for yourself? Create your very own account today. It’s free!