Fifteen years after it began as a college radio show at Cal State Long Beach, Soulection is throwing a one-day festival in Atwater Village that doubles as a homecoming for the Los Angeles collective's earliest champions. The anniversary lineup at Reframe Studios Outdoors features live DJ sets from founder Joe Kay, Sango, Esta, DJ Miss Milan, Ayanna Heaven and, for the first time on an official Soulection bill, KAYTRANADA.
From a South El Monte Bedroom to a Global Radio Brand
Soulection launched in 2011 when Kay began building the show at Cal State Long Beach, a starting point detailed by the Los Angeles Times. What grew out of that campus radio slot now encompasses a radio show, an independent record label, live events and a clothing brand, according to the same Times report. Soulection now has nearly 750 episodes on Apple Music, and the brand has championed artists including KAYTRANADA, Brent Faiyaz, Bryson Tiller and Snoh Aalegra before they became household names, the Times reports.
Kay founded Soulection alongside creative director Andre Power and French visual director Guillaume “96” Bonte, who helped shape it as a digital platform, record label and radio collective from the start, according to LA Weekly. Kay's broadcasting roots go back even further, to a 2007 podcast called Illvibes that he recorded out of his grandmother's den in South El Monte, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2015, before he became program director at KBeach Radio and developed the original Soulection format on 88.1 FM HD3.
KAYTRANADA's First Official Soulection Set
KAYTRANADA's appearance at the anniversary show marks his first time on an official Soulection lineup, per the Times. His 2013 release “Kaytra Todo” was an eight-track project. Kay held a private Los Angeles party with KAYTRANADA and Peggy Gou about four years before this article, according to the Times, and he described KAYTRANADA's work ethic as motivating.
The festival's sunset set, billed as Soulection and Friends, will bring out special guests to perform songs, and the Times reports that Kay added those performances after hearing audience feedback from a London event. DJ Miss Milan, who DJs for Doechii, and Ayanna Heaven, a New York artist with Jamaican heritage, round out the bill alongside Sango and Esta. Soulection has also given early platforms to Brent Faiyaz, Bryson Tiller and Anderson .Paak, the Times notes, and Kay said he evaluates emerging talent on their music, messaging, vision and how well they resonate with an audience.
A Soundstage Campus Built for Big Shows
The anniversary festival takes place at Reframe Studios Outdoors, a film and television soundstage campus at 4561 W. Colorado Blvd. built with heavy-duty ceiling rigging and acoustically isolated interior spaces, according to Beatportal. The venue is run by Framework, a Los Angeles promoter that debuted Reframe Studios' exterior grounds for an event on November 29, 2025, and scheduled the indoor series to launch on January 16, 2026. Framework specializes in turning unexpected spots like soundstages and historic buildings into temporary nightlife venues, per Canadianravers.
Soulection's global reach took off in July 2015 when Soulection landed a partnership with Apple Music to broadcast its radio show as a flagship program on the newly launched Beats 1 station, expanding its weekly sets to listeners in more than 100 countries, as reported by VICE.
A Separate Los Angeles Precedent
A distinct local example is Low End Theory, a weekly club night founded in 2006 at the Airliner in Lincoln Heights. According to the Los Angeles Times, it later spawned worldwide tours and a music festival before ending in 2018. That history offers a parallel for how a local music gathering can grow, but it is not evidence of a direct link to Soulection.
Joe Kay's Solo Project and an Eye on South Africa
Kay said the Times his debut EP, “If Not Now, Then When?,” released in 2025, taught him about accountability as he stepped into an executive producer role under his own name while still running the broader Soulection brand. The project features contributions from Arin Ray, Sinead Harnett, Dylan Sinclair and Grammy-winning producer D'Mile, who appears on two of the records, according to YAMS Magazine. Kay toured roughly 30 cities behind the project but did not finish the planned album during that run, the Times reports, and he now plans to focus on finishing it next.
Kay has also visited Cape Town and Johannesburg since 2015, curating shows with South African artists and producers, and he told the Times he wants to promote South African artists to a higher scale. He has spent the last year and a half working on Soulection's 15-year celebration, and alongside it he developed a new dance-music concept called Tempo, a Soulection sublabel focused on Afro electronic and house music that the Times describes as having no genre boundaries.
Borrowing a Blueprint From Stones Throw
Kay has pointed to Stones Throw Records, the independent Los Angeles label founded by Chris Manak, as a primary inspiration for Soulection's long-term approach. Kay has said Soulection has inspired other artists and collectives to start businesses, sign with agencies or find managers of their own.
Soulection's team includes people who have been with the organization for more than a decade, the Times reports, a continuity Kay pointed to even as he said he isn't complacent about what comes next. “There's so much more to do,” Kay told the Times — a sentiment that frames the anniversary show less as a victory lap than as a marker on a longer road.
