Feature: Helena shakes up the EDM industry

After performing almost every dance festival juggernaut across the globe, topping the club charts in the US, becoming the first female DJ to play Ultra Music’s mainstage and landing a residency in Las Vegas and a global record deal with Sony Music within four months of each other, Helena is now navigating her way through large-scale success whilst trailblazing her major label’s new EDM sector.

A self-described “mucka” in her formative years, Helena grew up in Bristol, England. At 14, she was already trying her hand at the desks, playing happy hardcore at local hall parties and picking up tips from her brother’s moonlight experience as a DJ at local nightclubs. Helena eventually took a job in Ibiza, splitting her time between running club nights for MTV and Pacha and DJing house music at events. Soon, her DJ work eclipsed her work as a promoter: “Djing crept up so slowly that it started taking over everything else. Suddenly I wasn’t a promoter anymore I was a DJ.”

A little known fact about the UK dance scene is that in the early noughties it engaged in a fierce overhaul; its once welcoming underground lost the cutting-edge schtick adopted by mainstream America. Competition between venues, promoters and DJs grew nasty as the industry’s walls closed in and the rave-era lost its culture. For Helena, the bidding wars for DJs and attacking of club promoters was more than just off-putting.

“The club scene was starting to get nasty. The scene over there was shrinking whereas before it was so buoyant; all the clubs were happy, everyone was busy,” she remembers. “Everyone started fighting because you’re fighting over punters. Promoters start getting nasty and suddenly it had become a big war you know, with promoters taking each other’s flyers out of the shops.

“I just didn’t like the politics of it all and the bitchiness,” she adds. “It’s not why I got into this […] I don’t want to play these childish games and be fighting like this.”

Helena’s 2012 track Girl From The Sky topped the ARIA Club chart for four weeks in 2013

Helena moved to Sydney in 2007 with no industry connections and a resolve to work solely as a DJ. Within four years she had headlined every club in the country, joined the lineup of Big Day Out, Future Music and played the mainstage of Stereosonic festival.

“I felt like I was playing the same clubs every week,” she says of her time in Australia. “I’m very ambitious and I felt like I had hit a roof.”

Two years ago Helena signed to Spin Artist Agency in the US, home to Avicii, Armin van Buuren, Will Sparks and Sydney-based artist Timmy Trumpet and in September 2013 she decided her big-fish-small-pond profile in the Australian market was holding her back from connecting to the fans her music is made for.

“It’s quite a risk moving over to a new country when you have already established yourself in another country,” she admits. “You go from being one of the leading artists in the country, to competing against the whole world.”

Within four months of moving to LA, Helena was offered a year-long residency at 4,500 capacity Vegas club Drai’s. And just as you would expect from the woman who sees limitations when reaching for the stars, Helena used 2014 to build her own brand, announcing her own party series during Miami Music Week in March and selling out its launch. Consequently, Helena has taken the vision of her Revolution parties to New York, Hollywood and of course Vegas, where she hosted and DJ’d a near 24-hour party at Drai’s.

Behind ‘Helena’ the brand is her manager Jon Hanlon, an EDM guru of sorts who last year joined Sony Music Australia and New Zealand in the newly created position of Director, Electronic Dance Music. Hanlon is currently at the forefront of Helena’s negotiations with the Vegas club scene for another residency and if industry whispers are true, the resulting contract will make her the highest paid female DJ in Las Vegas.

Of course, Hanlon spearheaded Helena’s record deal with Sony Music earlier this year, a deal Helena says took six months to finalise.

“They’re moving into new territory themselves with the EDM sector so a lot of their stuff that we were talking about was fresh grounds,” she explains. “They don’t really have any emerging DJs on the roster, it’s very much pop. This is Sony expanding into this sector so I wouldn’t sign the same contract as say One Direction.”

Appositely, Helena’s contract doesn’t bind her to album releases, or the type of album-oriented cycles her fellow Sony rostered acts have committed to. And while EDM artists like Avicii and Calvin Harris will achieve success with studio albums, their sentimentalism and radio-ready mixes are a far cry from Helena’s finger-on-the-pulse vocal house and underground techno repositioning.

“You can stay a lot more on point [when releasing singles], especially with the scene that I’m in, it moves so quickly,” she says. “What was cool six months ago is not cool now in a lot of cases.”

Ironically, it’s the ephemeral nature of the EDM industry that inspires Helena to change with trends and use digital platforms to release her music. In many cases, signing to a major label can slow down the release of new works as its hierarchy demands approval. Helena noted she had a tumultuous relationship with a previous record company, who were partial to sending back demos with criticisms that forced complete rewrites. However with Sony Music making its mark on the EDM industry with Hanlon and Ultra Music founder Patrick Moxey – who was appointed Sony’s President of Electronic Music in January 2013 – Helena’s works mirror the transitory complexion of the industry they’re written for.

Her recent track Raven, a gutsy dual homage to classic rave and the impending summer, and the magnetism of her upcoming single Shake It (out December 1 on Tiesto’s Musical Freedom and Sony Music Australia) outlines just part of her enviable position as bridge between the techno underground and the mainstream, major label camp. As she paves the way for emerging DJs wary and uninterested in the major label-synonymous 360 deal, Helena, with her new team at Sony Music it’s only a matter of time before the two worlds collide.