Years ago, we at Roulette looked at sustainability in the music industry, searching for environmentally friendly alternatives to what we produced. One of the largest obstacles we found was the lack of alternatives to PVC for pressing vinyl records. We couldn’t find one. So we looked into doing it ourselves. As everyone knows, that is how Evolution Music was founded.

What started with the belief that there’s a better way turned into years of development, more setbacks than we expected, and a lot of trial and error. There were points where it didn’t feel like it was going to work. But, with a lot of support from great individuals and organisations within the music industry, we kept going, because the problem hadn’t gone away, and neither had our reasons for wanting to solve it. Eventually, Evolution Music produced the world’s first bioplastic record, completely free of harmful fossil fuels: Evovinyl.

Now we’re at the point where, at Roulette, we’ve actually achieved our original goal. We’re able to produce the full run of The Ovines’ debut album “London Reign” on Evovinyl, and our future artists will follow the same standard. Seeing it happen, on a real record, for one of Roulette’s bands, and the knowledge that all of the future bands will do the same, is different from talking about it as a goal on a whiteboard. It’s the first time it’s felt finished rather than in progress.

This is a major milestone for us. It’s the achievement of the original goal we set out to reach at Roulette Records, and the entire reason Evolution Music exists in the first place. We wanted a more sustainable option than PVC, and we didn’t stop until we had one. We’re now at the forefront of the PVC alternatives being produced today, which is something we genuinely didn’t expect to be able to say when we started.

But we’ve come to realise this was never really just a Roulette problem. Every label pressing vinyl on PVC is pressing the same problem into every record they put out, and we know that doesn’t have to be the case anymore. What began as us trying to fix something in our own supply chain has turned into something we think the wider industry needs, and can now actually have.

That’s the part of this we’re most excited about going forward. Not just what Evovinyl means for Roulette, but what it can mean for a music industry that’s been waiting for an alternative that didn’t exist yet. We want to see more labels, more artists, and more of this industry we love pressing records the way we now can. This milestone isn’t an ending for us. It’s the point where the goal we set out to reach becomes something much bigger than the reason we started.

Thank you to everyone who’s helped us get here: the people who tested early versions with us, the ones who believed in the idea before it worked, and everyone who’s been patient while we figured it out. You know who you are.

London Reign is available now, pressed on Evovinyl through Roulette Records.

The Ovines — London Reign
Pressed on Evovinyl
Released by Roulette Records