Change The Beat, Sara Landry & HEKATE Records Open New Pathway For Emerging Electronic Artists

The electronic music world does not always make space for the people who built half its foundations, but Change The Beat is trying to shift that. The organisation has teamed up with Sara Landry and HEKATE Records to launch a DJ remix contest explicitly designed to support women and gender expansive artists, a pairing that feels less like a PR exercise and more like a genuine alignment of values between three names who have each put in the work independently before arriving at this collaboration.

Sara Landry has spent years earning her credibility in the harder, more uncompromising corners of techno, and HEKATE Records carries that same commitment to underground integrity in its catalogue. Change The Beat, for its part, has built a reputation around equity in electronic music that goes beyond issuing statements. Putting these three together for an underground remix challenge is the kind of structural move that actually changes who gets heard, not just who gets a platform mention in a press release.

The specifics of the contest, including submission deadlines, track details, and prize structure, are tied to the official announcement via Electric Mode and the partners’ own channels, and entrants should go directly to those sources for the full brief. What is clear from the framing is that this is not a mainstream festival giveaway or a big-room promo stunt. The house music competition and broader electronic music community this is aimed at is the one that cares about craft, about lineage, and about who gets to be heard on the dancefloor long term.

For producers and DJs who have been watching the conversation around gender equity in electronic music stall at the level of panel discussions and tokenistic bookings, this kind of initiative represents something more concrete. An underground remix challenge with the weight of Landry’s name and HEKATE’s curatorial standards behind it sends a signal to the wider scene that the conversation is moving from talk to output.

Whether the broader industry follows that lead is a separate question, but the underground rooms where this music actually lives have been watching these gaps for a long time. Change The Beat, Sara Landry, and HEKATE Records are putting something tangible on the table. That counts.