Music streaming can be a drag on the environment. These K-pop fans want to clean it up.

“I think streaming is especially nefarious because those negative impacts are happening so far away and in such an invisible way,” says Joe Steinhardt, an assistant professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia who studies the music industry and is the author of the book Why to Resist Streaming Music & How. He calls streaming music “a disposable listen” because of the way an app keeps pulling data from the cloud and not storing it locally.

Still, it’s hard to draw a definitive conclusion on whether streaming damages the environment more than buying physical copies; its actual carbon footprint depends on many factors. For example, streaming a music or lyrics video on a TV consumes significantly more electricity than using an energy-efficient device like a smartphone. But then smartphones present their own problems; they are very energy intensive to manufacture, and people often abandon them after a short time.

While the overall climate impact of streaming is still being studied, many of the problems it presents are undoubtedly exacerbated by the K-pop industry. The number of times a song is streamed is factored into music ranking charts, televised competitions, and awards. Artists with the highest streaming numbers are seen as more successful and consequently get more resources and exposure from the recording companies, incentivizing fans to keep streaming.

An offline event held for Kpop4planet’s campaign against plastic waste in physical albums.

As a result, many K-pop fans stream significantly more than listeners of other genres. In the streaming parties, fans play newly released songs for long periods of time in order to show their support, boost traffic numbers, and hopefully attract more fans to the songs. In 2022, Kpop4planet surveyed 1,097 fans (more than 75% of whom were in Korea) and found that the majority of them spent more than five hours per day in streaming parties. That is almost double the amount of time an average music consumer would spend listening to streamed songs, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). In extreme cases, streaming parties may push people to play the same song on multiple devices at once—sometimes muting them, so the music is not even being heard.

“Fandom at this level, whether it’s K-pop or any fandom, is an inherently wasteful concept. It’s based on how much can I waste to show that I love you,” says Steinhardt. In any musical genre, fans are used to expressing their love through excessive purchases because it’s a financial transfer to the artists. Streaming introduced new and less expensive ways to achieve the same goal, but they are nevertheless wasteful.

The practical solution, he says, is probably not to ask fans to stop being so devoted. “I recognize there’s a real value in that,” says Steinhardt. “So the question is, is there a way to do that that doesn’t involve overconsumption?”

Accountability for the streaming platforms

Instead of trying to change the individual actions of fans, Lee believes, it’s more important to hold big companies responsible for their behavior. “We believe that the environmental problems that the K-pop fans are suffering from are caused by the corporations,” she says. “They have the main keys to solving the climate crisis, as they are emitting lots of carbon emissions in the supply chain.”

So when Kpop4planet started its music-streaming campaign in 2022, it set its eyes on one particular solution: demanding that streaming companies switch to renewable energy.