Re:Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986
by benologist on Sunday September 08, 2019 @01:30PM
(#20911933)
You're totally right that there's a massive environmental cost either way.
Digitally the price per song of is offset by the sheer number of albums you can have. I have 1,926 albums and I can overwrite them with new artists on the same storage and I can add 10x more to the same storage. Or I can reuse the storage for something else. This versatility is called "re-use" and it's a pillar of environmental sustainability.
If it wasn't a malleable plastic, and I've read of metals being used, then perhaps it would be different. But even then density and permanence and shipping still make it incredibly inefficient to distribute data in this fashion - an LP only holds about 200 - 300 megabytes of write-once data.
Digitally the price per song of is offset by the sheer number of albums you can have. I have 1,926 albums and I can overwrite them with new artists on the same storage and I can add 10x more to the same storage. Or I can reuse the storage for something else. This versatility is called "re-use" and it's a pillar of environmental sustainability.
If it wasn't a malleable plastic, and I've read of metals being used, then perhaps it would be different. But even then density and permanence and shipping still make it incredibly inefficient to distribute data in this fashion - an LP only holds about 200 - 300 megabytes of write-once data.