The Headphones Might Be Homework at Dwight

In 2025 it launched a website featuring nine student artists and an ongoing group project covering songs by The Beatles. It now takes submissions from Dwight's campuses around the world.

For fifteen years I have said that listening to music is not doing anything. Dwight has gone and made it a department.

The label also went to Spark Tank, the school's incubator for student ventures, where a committee of parents and alumni gives feedback, mentoring and, for those who reach the launch stage, innovation grants. At the program's tenth-anniversary event in February 2025, a junior presented 566 Records alongside a robotics team that built starter robots for younger children, a computer-assisted recycling project, a nonprofit sending school supplies to West Africa, and a seventh grader's plan for a new way to enjoy portable hot chocolate.

Portable hot chocolate. Pitched to a committee. By a seventh grader. I want to be clear that I would invest.

The middle one is in seventh grade and spends a lot of time in headphones. For a year, every time I called him to dinner, he would remove one ear and say "I'm working," and I would look at the screen and see the same four seconds of music on a loop.

I have since learned what he was doing. He was making a beat. It is fifty-one seconds long. It uses a recording of the dog's collar jingling, the youngest saying "no" in three different voices, and the sound of the dishwasher door, which he recorded at two in the morning. It is, I have to tell you, catchy.

He played it for us at dinner last week. The eldest asked who it was by. He said his label. I asked what his label was called. He said it didn't have a name yet, but it had one artist and one fan, and he was looking at the fan.

It was the youngest. She asked to hear it again.