The impacts of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the environment have been a rich area for research in recent years. ICT has substantially affected commerce, enabling new methods for connecting producers and consumers (ie, e-commerce) and creating new electronic products. A prime example is the continuing rise of digital music delivery, which has obvious potential for reducing the energy and environmental impacts of producing and delivering music to final consumers. This study assesses the energy and CO₂ emissions associated with several potential alternative methods for delivering one album of music to a final customer, either via traditional retail or e-commerce sales of compact discs or via a digital download service. We analyze a set of six (3 compact disc and 3 digital download) scenarios of the delivery of one music album from the recording stage to the final consumer’s home in either CD or digital form.

We find that despite the increased energy and emissions associated with internet data flows, purchasing music digitally reduces the energy and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions associated with delivering music to customers by between 40 and 80% from the best-case physical CD delivery, depending on whether a customer then burns the files to CD or not. This reduction is due to both dematerialization of CDs and CD packaging as well as the logistics required to move physical CDs from production to the household. Given our assumptions, online delivery seems to be a clearly superior music delivery method when compared to traditional CD distribution. However, despite the clear dominance of the digital music delivery method, there are scenarios by which digital music performs less well. For instance, the traditional retail delivery scenario is nearly equivalent to downloading and burning if the customer walks rather than drives to the retail store. Similarly, if the file transfer size is increased to 260 MB the download and burn option looks very similar to the e-commerce delivery CD scenario due to increased Internet energy use for downloading. We discuss future research needs related to digital media and dematerialization of information products.