DJ Mag: diversity & equality report Q2 2021

Our quarterly update following our pledge last year, addressing how we can tackle racism and diversity issues within the electronic music industry as a publication

Community supportAZ Mag

We continue with our partnership with AZ Mag and AZ Mag grantee Xilhu Ayebaitari with the launch of her Queer Rave project. Queer Rave is due to launch in July and you can read more about Xilhu’s project here.

We also conducted a Writers Workshop in April. The workshop was designed to support aspiring freelance music journalists from the QTIBPOC community. You can learn more about this project here.

Sable Radio

DJ Mag continues to work alongside Sable Radio’s ReSound project as a media partner. 

Members of the DJ Mag team  travelled to Leeds in June and hosted a Partnerships Workshop, to share our knowledge on working in the brand partnerships space. 

Following on from this, we are also offering ongoing guidance to help them with pitches. We have also connected them with relevant brand managers from within our network.

We have set up an email, [email protected], for anyone that would like to discuss working with us on community support initiatives.

Business practices

Our third Diversity & Equality (Q1 2021) report was published across our digital channels in March 2021. Our Diversity and Equality Working Group continues to meet monthly to discuss activity and activations as well as to discuss the short- and long-term aims of our pledge. We have opened this up to our franchise partners and we encourage them to follow our lead in adopting a D&I initiative and invite them to engage with our continuing efforts. We continue to give free print & digital advertising to causes that support Black and non-Black POC community projects currently to the value of £60,000.00. This commitment to free advertising is an ongoing part of the business, including our digital campaigns.

Editorial standards

We continue to use our print and digital platforms to push forward our focus on D&I,  by featuring a diverse range of artists across the electronic music community.

Our editorial tone and language has been continually adjusted to better reflect the changing contemporary terminologies within Black and LGBTQ+ music, including genre and subgenre names.

In the first half of the year, we continued to showcase a diverse range of artists through our digital platforms, publishing a wide variety of features, mixes and premieres from Black, POC and LGBTQ+ artists. We will continue to represent artists, DJs, and labels from these communities into the next quarter and beyond.

Our video team continues to create our DJ Mag Originals content through the pandemic, with series including How I DJ, How I Made, The Story Of and Meet the MC. Each series features a diverse range of artists.

Series Playlists can be viewed at the links below:

• How I DJ

• How I Made

• The Story Of

• Meet the MC

Live events

In accordance with government guidelines in the UK & North America DJ Mag are now able to move forwards with live events. We are working with our headline artists and club/promoter partners to ensure all events are consistently supporting Black, Black LGBTQ+ & non-Black POC artists. Our first live event since December 2019 was announced earlier this month; you can find info here. We will include all event announcements within our quarterly updates for full transparency.

We continue to use our streaming platforms to champion artists from a diverse range of backgrounds.