Meet Sofia Ilyas Who Champions Diversity Through Her Work At Beatport

Beatport is one of the most recognized names within the dance music industry. It is a music source for deejays as well as the home of electronic music for deejays, producers and their fans. Sofia Ilyas, the chief community officer of The Beatport Group, has an important role within the worldwide platform as her mission is to empower women and people of color across the globe while making the electronic music industry a safer and more inclusive place for all. Her voyage to do so didn’t come without challenges, though.

“In many ways, I feel very lonely because there aren’t many South Asian women around music or [technology],” she says. “I’m always the odd one out. It’s hard to deny that. I’ve come to terms with it.”

Ilyas, one of the few Pakistani women in music, was kept from proceeding to further and higher education and listening to music in any form at home. Whilst some Muslims at the time listened to Western music and attended further education, her family didn’t prioritize or encourage it. This was the same for many other Muslim families in the ‘80s and ‘90s. At age 15, she found a Sony Walkman with a radio on it, giving her immediate access to music, which she hadn’t had before. She dreamt of finding something bigger through music.

“I didn’t know why I was having the thoughts that I was having,” Ilyas adds. “I didn’t know why I just couldn’t be married and be happy and have that kind of lifestyle. I wanted more. The more I went in that direction, the more I felt alienated.”

Music gave her hope for finding a new passion within the last two years of her education. While her family was asleep, she says she secretly listened to Radiohead, Counting Crows and other lyric-based acts on tapes given to her by school friends. She says this “resonated with the loneliness I felt.” It was incredibly surreal to her that many years later she would sign an artist who would go on to tour with Thom Yorke.

Finding solace in music lyrics was mainly prominent when she applied to an all-girls college. Her teacher helped her fill out the application and she forged her parent’s signature. This was a final chance at being able to continue her education, thinking her parents might change their minds if she secured a place in an all-girls school. She was admitted to the private school, having been awarded a means-tested bursary, which covered 100% of the school fees. This impressed her community and pressured her parents to allow her to attend. She says she was “suddenly around these incredibly strong women, highly educated [and] from a very wealthy background who listened to music.” Ilyas spent most of her time sitting with the other women and listening to music, which was her first experience of hearing people actively talk about music, referring to the lyrics and recommending other songs—further sparking her interest in music.

When she was 19 years old, Ilyas fled Cardiff to London with the help of her school in search of a new life, which was incredibly unusual for a Muslim woman in the 1990s, especially as it was done in such an organized fashion—the school organized it, the teacher personally took her on the train and placed her in a women’s refuge in London. The police informed her parents that she had left and that they couldn’t report her missing.

“To have done that in the ‘90s and my family not to be able to do much about it…I was just gone,” she says. “It was hugely impactful on them, the community, my brothers and sisters. The biggest issue, I think, for me, that I’ve had to deal with is that it validated the community’s impression that when women are educated, they do bad things.”

While she knew that coming to London verified her father’s and most of the community’s impression of women having an education, she also understood the impact it would have on her sisters. However, she knew she was leaving for a better and freer life. She listened to music on her trip to London, adding that music has always been a way for her to deal with her surroundings. However, she was met with a culture shock once she arrived in the city. Ilyas lived in a temple for three years, which she says was her “way of hiding away from an environment that I was just not ready for,” which she didn’t consider prior to leaving Cardiff. The music at the temple was her first experience engaging with and enjoying music outside of her Sony Walkman. However, she notes that the Quran is meant to be recited, having a melodic sound to it, so chanting music is connected to her primary years.

“I remember less of the religious element [of the Quran music],” Ilyas says. “I really enjoyed the sound of the drums. It really resonated with me and it made me feel something. I always knew from a young age that music made me feel something. That was the thing that I always held onto. It was just many years later, at the age of 28, that I had my first club experience.”

Her first time clubbing was at the esteemed London venue Fabric. Her first show was a drum’n’bass night, which she says was a sensory overload due to the smoke, lighting, sound and music. After her first club experience, she attended live shows every week and would try to talk to anyone she could behind the scenes to get closer to the music industry.

“I wanted to talk to everyone to understand how this whole environment was pieced together,” Ilyas says. “Then it was by the age of 30, I knew that it was interesting because coming to London, I’ve never been able to find my home, my place and my peace. That was always quite tragic for me because I kept saying to myself, ‘Why did I leave then? Why did I do all of this chaos or what I considered chaos for what?’”

When the chief community officer of The Beatport Group was 30 years old, she knew something had to change, and the only thing she knew was that she enjoyed music. After meeting with Nils Frahm in person in London after his performance in a room of fewer than 100 people, she spent hours with him, hearing his vision for himself and his career. She decided to go all in and relocate to Berlin to dedicate herself to his career and the label Erased Tapes Records, the latter she ended up co-managing for five years.

She found many now acclaimed talent at the beginning of their careers in the music mecca. She started expressing her opinions to artists on their careers and how the PR campaigns should run. Even though she had no prior experience in this field, she had a strong gut instinct, which started paying off. While Ilyas loved music and found a safe space, passion and purpose in it, she had no prior musical education or career in it, putting her in a place to learn the industry very quickly and “put aside any ego around not knowing things.”

“From there on,” she says, “I knew music was everything. To me, it was my future. It was my obsession. It was somehow my way to connect, and also in many ways, it became my way to deal with my social anxiety [and] my overthinking because leaving the environment that I left, I’ve always felt like people [were] staring at me. I’ve always had that insecurity that maybe others don’t, and music helped me socialize. It helped me be less aware of myself and absorb myself in shows. I think that’s one of the reasons I love putting on events now as well. It’s sort of a therapy to me. In many, many ways, music has answered a lot of questions for me.”

At the beginning of Ilyas’ career, she focused on what an artist’s live setup looked like as she was curious. During this, discovered the first artist of color she had seen live: Four Tet. She believes there should be more exposure and encouragement for people of color and women to enter and thrive in music. “If you told me when I was younger I’d be here right now, I would never have believed it,” she notes.

Organizations, she says, should come together instead of putting in individual efforts, which would be helpful because “everyone ends up having their own little idea of what potentially diversity is and their own initiatives.” There would be more strength and progression in diversifying music if organizations united because “real change comes from [a] community, meaning everyone coming together around a table discussing it [and being] really open to their challenges,” she adds.

“I think there are two things the industry has to consider: One is how to attract more people on the diversity side,” Ilyas says. “The second part of it is what environment are they actually coming into? Is it a safe environment? Is it an encouraging environment and a nourishing environment—one of mentorship and also one that understands what diversity actually means? I think there’s still a lot of work to be done, and I would love to invite every organization [to] get together and do this as a unified thing rather than individual efforts.”

Her mission is to empower and support women and people of color to thrive through music and the music industry, which she does by studying the current electronic music industry landscape and comparing it to 10 or 20 years ago by looking into aspects such as music sales. Ilyas says Beatport dives into what efforts have been made to see if it has impacted the exposure of women when it comes to music sales. She joined Beatport three months ago, focusing on this data and seeing where changes can be made to help with diversity. She says very few women and non-binary artists are featured in top sales charts for electronic music. Her job at the global platform is to review the current landscape, what changes have been made to date, what more needs to be done and to collaborate with others—artists, organizations, record labels and more—for continued positive change.

Part of Ilyas’ plan is to work on sharing knowledge in diversity and inclusion with musicians, labels and everyone who engages with the music community through her role at Beatport, especially because it’s a platform that interacts with thousands of artists and record labels, having a huge potential for positive impact. She sees that many people want to make changes but are unsure of where to start. She returns to her previous point about people coming together to make a change, noting that her hope is to “bring across the South Asian voice, my experience as well as a voice to the table.” She recognizes she doesn’t stand for every community nor does any individual, and she adds that everyone has a different understanding of what diversity means to them.

Beatport has The Diversity + Parity Fund, which aims to support organizations focused on underrepresented groups and promote diversity within the music industry. It offers financial support, editorial exposure and marketing on its social media platforms to increase an organization’s impact and reach. Last year, Beatport distributed $100,000 to three organizations focused on diversity in the electronic music community: Lady Of The House, Future Female Sounds and #FORTHEMUSIC. This year, the fund has been increased by 50% to $150,000 and offers two types of grants: One for smaller organizations ($3,000 to $15,000) and one for larger organizations ($15,001 to $30,000). The deadline to apply is September 1. For both the organizations selected and not selected, Beatport will host a community hub on their editorial site, Beatportal, to interview them around topics such as diversity and well-being.

Indeed, Ilyas proves to be a strong figure within the diversity and inclusion space at Beatport and a woman who has overcome many challenges and taken big risks in her life. While she says she puts on a strong persona, she has her own struggles. She says small things such as listening to music, going for walks and eating healthy do help, but she still has a hard time “even just being me and [keeping] up this persona that I’ve put out there.”

“I hope that somebody reads this and they want to reach out or they want to talk as well because, to me, it’s not always easy being a South Asian woman by herself in London,” Ilyas says. “I think I’ve always been so focused on a put-together profile and I’ve forgotten sometimes that actually maybe it is good to also be vulnerable.”