Music Climate Pact: The Songs Emitting The Most Carbon, Revealed

With reports recently revealing that the major music labels such as Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group are uniting to pledge net-zero emissions by 2050 – the climate emergency within the music industry has never been more prominent.

With this in mind, Uswitch.com/gas-electricity was curious to find out the environmental cost of the world’s most popular songs. After investigating the carbon emissions of over 200 tunes based on Spotify data on play count, duration, and the total number of streams, they can now reveal all!

The results:

#	Song	Artist	Number of streams	Total carbon emissions (tons)	Trees needed annually
1	Heat Waves	Glass Animals	842,133,398	3,072	128,019
2	good 4 U	Olivia Rodrigo	1,053,582,036	2,868	119,480
3	Kiss Me More	Doja Cat (ft. SZA)	857,843,096	2,735	113,948
4	Beggin	Maneskin	752,455,682	2,432	101,336
5	Bad Habits	Ed Sheeran	677,858,022	2,390	99,568
6	MONTERO	Lil Nas X	1,109,814,648	2,335	97,285
7	Leave The Door Open	Silk Sonic (Bruno Mars & Anderson .Paak)	628,987,635	2,326	96,935
8	STAY	The Kid LAROI & Justin Bieber	1,066,974,185	2,312	96,315
9	INDUSTRY BABY	Lil Nas X & Jack Harlow	703,436,577	2,278	94,931
10	Pepas	Farruko	453,271,347	1,988	82,846
11	traitor	Olivia Rodrigo	488,776,255	1,712	71,321
12	Happier Than Ever	Billie Eilish	350,688,037	1,601	66,726
13	Save Your Tears	The Weeknd & Ariana Grande	509,312,580	1,486	61,929
14	Need to Know	Doja Cat	430,358,723	1,384	57,684
15	Levitating	Dua Lipa	367,358,544	1,143	47,660

Uswitch.com/gas-electricity/ discovered that Glass Animals’ hit ‘Heat Waves’ has emitted the most CO2 (a whopping 3,072 tonnes), taking a staggering 128,019 trees to compensate for those emissions generated. Despite being the fifth most-streamed song of all analysed, the length of this pop success (3min58sec) contributed to its high carbon footprint. As a result, the hit would need 26% more trees planted annually to compensate for its emissions than fellow rock band Maneskin and their song ‘Beggin’ (101,336 trees needed annually) which places fourth.

In second is the song of the summer, ‘good 4 U’ by Olivia Rodrigo with a total of 2,868 tonnes of carbon emitted from the whopping 1,053,582,036 number of streams on Spotify – 115% more than her other success, ‘traitor’. It would need 128,019 trees planted annually to compensate for the carbon emissions of ‘good 4 U’,67% more trees than ‘traitor’, which places 11th (71,321 trees needed).

Doja Cat’s song featuring SZA ‘Kiss Me More’ has emitted the third most amount of carbon at 2,735 tonnes. The hit would need 113,948 trees planted annually to compensate for the staggering amount of carbon emitted, – 97% more trees planted compared to another one of her hits– ‘Need to Know’ which places 14th (57,684 trees needed annually).

Baby Shark has NOT emitted the most carbon amongst the top kids’ songs

Uswitch.com/gas-electricity/ furthered their analysis to determine which popular children’s songs had emitted the most carbon. They can now reveal that How Far I’ll Go from the Disney film Moana has emitted the most at 954 tonnes of carbon, resulting in 39,759 trees planted annually to compensate for the emissions. In comparison, this song has emitted 1,302% more carbon than fellow Disney song ‘Lead the Way’ from Raya and the Last Dragon – which places third and has emitted 69 tonnes of carbon.

Surprisingly to most, Baby Shark misses out on top spot and comes in second place, having emitted 52% less (452 tonnes) carbon than How Far I’ll Go in first place. In total, Baby Shark would need 18,816 trees planted annually to make up for the emissions, a staggering 645,614% more than the remix ‘Baby Shark Monster Truck’, which has emitted just 0.07 tonnes of carbon from its Spotify streams.

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Please refer to the full study https://www.uswitch.com/gas-electricity/the-songs-that-have-caused-the-most-carbon-emissions/ for more information

Methodology:

Uswitch.com/gas-electricity/ sought to determine the estimated carbon footprint of over 200 popular songs – including Christmas hits and children’s songs.
Billboard.com Top 100 Chart* was used as a suitable seed list for the world’s 100 most popular songs. Chart rankings are based on sales (physical and digital), radio play, and online streaming.
A seedlist of the most popular Christmas and children’s songs was collected from high authourity articles.
Following this, song duration and play count were collected from tthe Spotify API (application programme interface) and Open Spotify (Desktop) respectively for each song within our sample.
Proceeding the collection of data, total carbon emissions were calculated by using the Carbon Trusts revised emission estimates of hourly video-on-demand streaming. This states that approximately 55g of CO2 is emitted during every hour of online video streaming. It must be noted that carbon emissions of video streaming are assumed to be equivalent to emissions from music streaming for this study.
The total song emissions are calculated as 55 divided by 3,600 (emissions per second) multiplied by each song duration in seconds (emissions per stream) multiplied by total play count (total emissions).
Subsequently, Uswitch.com/gas-electricity/ extended the analysis to estimate the number of trees required to compensate for the CO2 emissions generated from each song. These estimates are based on an assumed rate of carbon absorption at 24kg CO2 per tree annually, and an average of 500 trees per hectare in Europe – according to Encon.
Number of trees required to absorb carbon emissions are calculated as total song emissions (g) divided by 1000 – to get song emissions in KG – divided by 24.
All data was collected in November 2021 and is accurate as of then.