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Courtesy Photo
Sydney Blu at a Change the Beat workshop
Features
Change The Beat Empowers Emerging DJs and Producers Across Canada
Sydney Blu's non-profit is touring Canada with a series of events, promoting women and gender-diverse DJs and producers and providing skill-building workshops ahead of each tour stop.
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Change The Beat is opening doors for women in electronic music across the country.
With her non-profit Change The Beat, DJ Sydney Blu has curated a series of parties and workshops throughout Canada that create opportunity and education in every city they come to.
The inaugural Change The Beat tour features a stacked lineup of female and gender-diverse DJs including Bambii, Maya Jane Coles and Joanna Magik, in ten Canadian cities. Each performance date also includes a workshop at a local Long & McQuade music store, with Blu and other artists providing advice on how to develop a career in dance music.
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The tour has already gone through Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Toronto, London, Halifax and Montreal. Billboard Canada caught up with Sydney Blu ahead of the Montreal date on Nov. 8 to talk about how Change The Beat is de-mystifying the industry.
"It's not easy," Blu says of getting started as a producer.
Blu has built an impressive career, from launching her own imprint Blu Music in 2009, to releasing on Deadmau5's Mau5trap label, to residencies in Toronto and Miami and performances at major festivals like Electric Island, Digital Dreams and Burning Man. But she says her path was an unusual one.
"I winged my career, I figured it out as I went along — and ultimately that's not how you want to do it," she says.
When she was getting started, there were few other women coming up alongside her. Women are underrepresented across the music industry, but particularly in dance music, where boys clubs persist on label rosters and festival lineups.
"When I started I think women were 2% of all DJs," Blu says. She says it's around 16% now.
That underrepresentation inspired Blu to start the #23by23 campaign in 2021, which advocated for dance labels to have 23% women on their roster by the year 2023. Though many still have a ways to go to get to that number, the campaign was a marked success, running remix contests that have awarded prizes to 75 women and gender-diverse producers.
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In 2023, Blu decided to keep momentum going, officially launching Change The Beat as a non-profit.
The first Change The Beat events happened this year in Ibiza and Miami, followed by the current tour. The tour pairs Blu with a local DJ at each stop.
Montreal's party featured up-and-comer Molyness, who will also take the stage at Igloofest in the winter. Blu and Molyness shared the DJ booth at Montreal club Newspeak, bringing crisp EDM beats and loose house grooves to the young crowd.
As much as she enjoys the parties, Blu says the workshops have been particularly inspiring.
"People come out of them and they're like, 'wow I didn't know so much.'" Blu talks about how to shop a demo, how to market yourself, and what to think about when making a track in the studio, building towards an explanation on the importance of managers and agents.
"It all leads to the same thing which is: how do you become a touring artist? How do you get yourself from DJing the local club in your own community, to being able to get noticed by the record labels and then ultimately an agency, and then on planes and going to different cities?" she says.
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For anyone starting out, her most important piece of advice is to learn "the art of marketing" — which means more than just Instagram ads. "If you just focus 100% on social media, you're at the whim of their algorithm," she explains. Blu says there's plenty of other ways to market yourself, from building a mailing list to starting a discord.
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That's especially important as the broader industry loses interest in conversations about representation.
"I feel like it's not really as hot of a topic as it was a couple years ago," Blu says. She says we shouldn't stop putting pressure on bookers and event producers to do better. "I don't think that there's an excuse for booking an all-male lineup."
Women have always been a part of electronic music. Blu mentions the documentary Sisters With Transistors, which highlights trailblazers like Delia Derbyshire, who notably composed the Doctor Who theme. But they haven't always been recognized.
Now, Blu is seeing younger generations advocate for representation, which was more rare when she was starting. "It's funny — when the younger collectives of women started saying 'hey, you know, this isn't cool, we want equality,' it was almost weird for me to see that."
Inspired by that younger generation, she's is now focused on sharing her skills with new artists coming up.
The Change The Beat tour is just one step: the non-profit has big plans to launch membership and mentorship programs next year, operating virtually to reach people who might not be able to come dance in person.
In the meantime, the tour has four more dates in Calgary, Victoria, Ottawa and Toronto, providing workshops and parties in each city — bringing people together to share skills and make memories, some of the best organic marketing there is.
Change the Beat goes to Sub Rosa in Calgary on Nov. 22 and The Downbeat in Victory on Nov. 23 before heading to City at Night in Ottawa Dec. 14 and a special edition of EQ Live in collaboration with SiriusXM featuring Bambii in Toronto on December 21.
Find out more info here.
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