Doughnut Music Lab is based on Kate Raworth’s concept of ‘doughnut economics‘. Raworth and others have convincingly argued that the objective of unchecked economic growth is nowhere near being sufficiently decoupled from the industrial burning of fossil fuels, and as a result the current global economic model we use is propelling us all into an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
The model of doughnut economics is based on a sustainable window for economic activity, with a social foundation of well-being that no one should fall below (the inner ring of the doughnut), and an ecological ceiling of planetary pressure that we should not go beyond (the outer ring of the doughnut). As Raworth says, “between the two lies a safe and just space for all.” Raworth’s model is about as high level as it’s possible to get, global in scale, but she encourages people working in different areas to adapt and apply the model to their own fields. So a group of us wanted to explore how we might apply the Doughnut to the music sector.
We’re releasing albums on a sleeve-only and digital download format, meaning that we’re printing beautiful 12-inch vinyl record sleeves, but the vinyl record itself is conspicuously absent. Instead the manufacturing budget goes to creating lovely paper inserts with specially-made artwork and a download code. The sleeve itself is printed on recycled card using plant-based inks, and as such there will be a minimum of new plastic generated for the album release.
To be clear, we love vinyl records and don’t want to get rid of them (although we’d welcome them being made of renewable materials), and we don’t see a paper ‘sleeve-only and download code’ album release as a one-size-fits-all solution. We see it as an artistic intervention, with any impact coming from its symbolic power – the power of directing attention and holding space for imagining alternative ways of being in the world. In other words, it’s a prompt to spark conversation around how truly high-emitting areas of human activity (e.g. energy, transport, food, manufacturing) all need to change dramatically. Hopefully it will be received as it’s intended, as a playful experiment.
Although our launch experiment is releasing two albums, we’re not aiming to be a label. We want to be a lab: an art and research collective inspired by doughnut economics to imagine what shape musical life might take in a post-fossil fuel future. Hopefully a variety of experiments will follow!
The text above is excerpted from a feature article originally published by The Skinny magazine, which you can read in full here.