Goddesses of Beat-Making Unite
Take a look at the iTunes or Beatport dance music charts, and you’ll see that the top tracks are lopsidedly from male artists. DJ Mag’s 2014 Top 100 DJs included two women, and the list Resident Advisor put out—though it’s known for tapping into less mainstream electronic music—featured only a handful more female producers.
There are, of course, some standout (and kick-ass) women who’ve made it into the boy’s club—including twin sisters Nervo, UK-based house artist Maya Jane Coles, Australian producer Anna Lunoe, and the newly female-only duo Krewella. Day Trip, the first electronic music festival to feature an all-woman lineup, is happening in Chicago on May 31.
Still, the women making massive festival lineups and gaining regular chart-topping hits are far fewer than their male counterparts. This isn’t for lack of female talent, says Christina Rose, a DJ and the founder of female DJ community The Athena Collective.
Rose got started as an event producer five years ago and then moved into working on festivals, such Pennsylvania’s Freeform Arts Festival, of which she is now a producer along with her partner and the founder of the festival, Michael “Coyoti” Beerley and a small production team. A year and a half ago, she became more deeply involved in the scene by learning how to DJ, playing house and deep house music under the name Christina Leorosa.
Last fall, Rose’s event production work and her music brought her out to Los Angeles full-time. Before making the move from the East Coast, she wanted to connect with other women in the electronic music industry in L.A. She took to Facebook, imagining she’d find more than a few groups for West Coast women in the industry.
She did find one, run by a man, with a few members and not-so-recent updates.
“I decided, I’ll just make one,” Rose says now. She added her East Coast female DJ friends and asked them to spread the group to their friends as well. At the beginning, The Athena Collective—named for the Greek goddess of wisdom and the arts, because “Female DJ Group” sounded too lame—had about 20 members.
Now, The Athena Collective has almost 200 members from across North America and Europe. Every potential member has to fill out a membership form—which asks basic facts as well as deeper questions, such as what a potential member hopes to contribute to the Collective—before she can join the closed group. The details from this form are open-access to all other members. This allows anyone in the network to look up other members in a new area they’re visiting, and link up to jam, chat, or get the lowdown on possible gigs in the area.
Mainly, the Collective aims to empower and inspire women who want to get involved in electronic music, or the music industry in general. This happens largely online through the Facebook group, but women have also begun to set up informal meetups in both New York and Los Angeles to hang out, network, play music and trade songs. One of the organizers on the East Coast, Rebecca-Emma “Pink”, has hosted member gatherings at her home, although the group hasn’t yet done many official events. Rose, however, says she wants to start doing more regular showcases. Monthly networking meetups start this summer.
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“We recently had our first East Coast showcase at the esteemed Brooklyn club Verboten,” Rose says. “One goal of the Collective is to host monthly or quarterly showcases such as this in each major city we become active in.” Right now, these cities include New York City, L.A., Philadelphia and San Francisco, where The Athena Collective also recently held a showcase at the club Monarch.
The Athena Collective also recently partnered with Beat Lab Academy, a DJ school that offers classes, workshops and private lessons to teach people how to produce. Beat Lab and the Collective now host free, monthly software education workshops in L.A., teaching aspiring female DJs to use Ableton. “They told me they loved what I was doing, and they also wanted to help promote the growth of female DJs,” Rose says. So far, the partnership has hosted two such Beat Lab workshops.
“There are thousands of under-the-radar female DJs,” Rose says. “Men just tend to get booked more. I’m not really sure why that is. Maybe women who are interested in getting into it are hesitant, because—from the outside—it looks like a male-dominated industry.”
But Rose is quick to say that gender doesn’t matter, as long as you know what you’re doing. “Consider Annie Mac or Maya Jane Coles. These women are icons of the electronic music scene. No one questions them, because they are extremely talented at their craft and are also incredible businesswomen. Bottom line, if you’re really good, gender isn’t an issue.”
For aspiring female DJs, Rose’s advice is to first work hard and hone the craft. “You should be able to talk shop. Know your equipment inside and out.”
Beyond that, the greatest asset for women aspiring to enter the industry is other women who have already done it, or other women who are also trying to do it. And that’s what The Athena Collective is for: inspiring and empowering women, increasing visibility for female electronic artists, and creating a strong community that women can draw from when it feels like they’re the only woman in the business.
In the long-term, Rose hopes to expand the Collective to be active in major cities all over the world and do everything it can to showcase female talent. The Athena Collective is still in its infancy, with much more to come—including, hopefully, a lot more women on those top 100 lists.
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