I agree, and I am pretty good myself, I don’t fly, I don’t use my car unless absolutely necessary, I try to eat local produce, I avoid single use plastic, I don’t consume much, I hate waste and planned obsolescence, I repair things, I don’t buy loads of clothes, I tend to keep most things for years - in short there is not much more that I could do in this regard given the circumstances I live in.
Yeah I buy a few bits of music gear per year, but beyond that not much else, really.
I am not trying to shame anybody: we are creatures of our environment.
But our environment caused this. No way around it. Do we switch it up, or do we protect our creature comforts?
I mean I’m not disagreeing with you, and yes things like streaming, celebrity worship, Hollywood, fashion industry, corporate media/entertainment, new phone every year etc are things that are easy to avoid and would make big changes - but it seems most are unwilling to give them up. We as individuals can only do what we can do, and at best hope to influence others.
I’ve been a vegetarian for over 6 years and I sold my car maybe 4 years ago. I still occasionally take airplanes, it’s hard mannn. Despite all that I still feel like questioning my other consuming habits is worth it. Even though it might be “completely useless” as you put it, it matters to me how much I’m destroying the ecosystem when I buy and listen to music. If I don’t care about those things, how can I expect those mf CEOs to do the same.
That said I was not a super huge vinyl fan before so it was easy for me to give up. I completely understand that it means a lot more to some people. But still, I think it’s worth asking oneself “Can I live without this?”.
There have been moments in history where political bravery put an end to behavior that we now see as abhorrent. With that kind of leadership, things can change, whether people like it or not.
Definitely. There are still so many people out there who still don’t understand what’s going on. I’m sure we here all know someone who doesn’t; live in communities who don’t.
Walk around any town or city and most people are staring into little screens avoiding reality, that needs to change first.
I said it before, we need to turn off the internet 
I used to back-up and burn mp3s to CDs (and tonnes of other stuff) and I’ve thrown a lot away over the years. I’ve never thrown away any records.
Like a man trying to drain a lake with a bucket
It’s funny but there aren’t really any laws on making things. There are just prices of raw commodity based on scarcity. So entities can basically do whatever the fuck they want, like something like producing billions of phones every year - should that even be legal? There seems to be no tap on what’s allowable as far as production goes, no upper limits to the heights of production and profit. Go as high as you can go man, be all you can be.
In some other world there would be caps on all this stuff, we’ve let it all run unchecked and free for far too long. Like all that plastic throw away shit that you find in $1 thrift stores, at this point that shit should just be straight up illegal, heavy fines if found producing it. Start to head down that path of production caps and real, tangible approaches to optimisation and products based on absolute minimums as far as materials are concerned.
The joys of late stage capitalism.
TBH, I’d be mortified if all the records I’ve bought over the last 35 years ended up in landfill. There’s some real quality in there. In all fairness, I do my bit where I can for the environment, but in the grand scheme, I honestly don’t give a flying fuck these days, especially with the lying scum bag rat shit tories running the show, and I’m certainly not stopping buying a few records now and again. I’ll prob be dead in 20 years, so let the young ones sort it out amongst themselves. 
Feels good man<3
I also wanted to say earlier in the thread, that while globalisation has definitely enabled these global musicians and ways of hearing music we didn’t have 100 years ago, I feel that music is this incredibly positive thing. So yes there emissions to enable all that, but the happiness it brings to people lives, the memories and the key moments, it’s almost everything for some people. I feel like some emission for that is reasonable. Yes there are greedy record company peeps but the benefit of it is the people get the music.
I guess in that way radio transmission still remains a pretty old school, but stable way of transmission, people had wireless radios for years and that’s as cable-free and futuristic as you can get, albeit not on demand.
But yeah what I mean to say is, so much positivity is put into music. Just thinking about any musician practicing for years and years, all their dreams hopes and desires, all their talent funnelled into a recording medium. The recording and dispersal of music is one of life’s great achievements and it’s net benefit is almost always positive in so many ways, that some emissions for music I think is ok based on what it does for peoples mental state and the happiness in their lives. I can think of so many other industries I’d want to cut down before music.
We’re all still here. You first!
I would rather be happy and listening to cannibal corpse while watching the world cook to death, yes.
I can’t get to Big Ben at this time of night.
Regardless of my good intentions and ability to care for tape and disc media, 2/3 of my extensive tape and CD collection are in landfill.
They didn’t survive my 4 children, hot Australian cars and 1 flood.
I still however have every limewire, bit torrent, CD rip, itunes download on multiple hard drives…
But to really make you all angry, I now only listen to spotify…
Here, we disagree. Not only can these things be studied and compared, people have already done the work and all anyone needs to do is read about it.
To start, I recommend Kyle Devine’s Decomposed: A Political Ecology of Music, which directly compares shellac, vinyl, CDs, and server based music. He’s careful, thorough, and admits what he doesn’t know. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/decomposed
If I’m using spotify and am likely to listen to an album again I usually hit the download button. At least there is a little bit of mitigation built in there as an option.
Still waiting for the Youtube collector’s edition DVD box set to come out though, that’s my real streaming guilt.
Personally my vinyl collecting is pretty sparse, it’s a high bar of favourite album that will be added, and there’s a bit of bias towards styles of music that ‘suit’ the format, not pretending that’s overly rational in application though.
Following the inevitable collapse, I tell myself vinyl records are a format I could probably get working (or at least spin really fast and listen to the unamplified needle).
Two extremes:
Lo-tech (don’t do this, you’ll kill your record):
Hi-tech
