Spotify’s rising carbon footprint from turning audio into video

In its latest study, Greenly, the specialist in carbon accounting and management for enterprises, estimates the growing ecological cost of music streaming, with a particular focus on Spotify, the Swedish giant of online music streaming.

The impact is anything but immaterial: Greenly highlights streaming’s reliance on an increasingly energy-intensive infrastructure. Whether it’s servers, transmission networks, data centres, Spotify’s growing use of AI, or even users’ own devices, every component contributes to the platform’s ecological impact. While video streaming has increasingly come under scrutiny, music is no exception – particularly when playlists are played on loop every day.

An ecological sonic boom flying under the radar

Although Spotify includes a section on its carbon footprint in its annual report, the data has been incomplete since 2021, as the company no longer accounts for the electricity consumption of user devices. To provide a more comprehensive estimate, Greenly used the last complete dataset from 2021 and adjusted it to reflect Spotify’s growth in users between 2021 and 2025. By Q1 2025, the streaming giant had an estimated 678 million users – a 67% increase from 406 million in 2021.

Based on this approach, Greenly estimates that Spotify will emit 187,040 tonnes of CO2e in 2025 – roughly 12 times the most recent carbon footprint of Vatican City. This marks a 67% increase from 112,000 tonnes in 2021, with emissions averaging roughly 1.04g of CO2e per hour of listening. Greenly estimates that the average user would emit around 276g per year listening to Spotify – a relatively modest footprint, but one that becomes significant at a global scale.

Without the energy-intensive demands of video processing, music streaming typically produces lower emissions, partly due to smaller file sizes. However, constant use by millions of users quickly adds up, resulting in substantial overall emissions.

Video integration - a larger carbon footprint on the horizon?

In 2024, Spotify began rolling out video clips for certain tracks – a shift toward a significantly more energy-intensive format. Streaming video for an hour can generate up to 55g of CO2e, over 50 times more than an hour of audio streaming. For now, the feature is limited to Spotify Premium subscribers (268 million as of Q1 2025), and actual uptake remains uncertain. If most users continue to listen passively – with the app running in the background and the screen locked – interest in video content may remain limited.

However, if Spotify redesigns its interface to promote visual engagement, for example by expanding its catalogue of music videos, the impact could be substantial. If all Premium users switched to video streaming, emissions would rise by an estimated 3.92 million tonnes per year. Ultimately, the environmental impact will depend on Spotify’s strategic direction and how users respond to this new offering.

According to Alexis Normand, CEO of Greenly, “Digitisation is often seen as carbon neutral. However, digital modes of consumption such as streaming still rely on tangible physical infrastructure, which continue to be powered by fossil fuels. Occasionally, this makes it harder to fully appreciate the ecological impact of one’s actions.’

Despite Spotify’s seeming omnipresence, it only represents around 32% of the global music streaming market, a share which falls to 23% when all audio is considered (including radio, YouTube etc.). Spotify’s carbon emissions are therefore just the tip of the iceberg - the overall impact of audio streaming is much broader.

A note on methodology

Greenly’s estimates use Spotify’s 2021 data as a starting point, including the electricity consumption of user devices. It is assumed that emissions grow linearly, following Spotify’s user growth up to 2025. In the absence of data provided by the Swedish giant, it is also assumed that the usage and energy efficiency of underlying infrastructure has remained stable.

Hourly emissions were calculated by applying the 2021 average listening time (266 hours per user per year) to the 2025 user base, resulting in an estimated 180.35 billion streaming hours. The total 2025 emissions figure (187,040 tonnes) was then divided by this to give an average of 1.037 grams of CO₂e per hour of music streamed.

The full study is available here.