Aslice Offered Carrots. Fixing Dance Music Requires Sticks.

a.k.a. Thoughts on the closure of the ambitious revenue-sharing platform, and what it says about the current state of DJ culture and dance music.

Building Aslice into a sustainable endeavor was never going to be easy.

Founded by trusted electronic music veteran DVS1 and publicly launched in 2022, the revenue-sharing platform was based upon a relatively straightforward premise: that DJs not only could, but should share a portion of their fees with the artists whose music they’d played in their sets. It was something of a radical idea—DJs by and large had never before been expected, or even really asked, to directly compensate producers—but Aslice, seeing the widening gap between the two groups’ earning potential, argued that a major rebalancing of the scales was in order.

Their argument undoubtedly had merit. During the past two decades, electronic music has grown into a global, multibillion-dollar industry, and DJ fees have exploded, with many top-tier DJs now routinely earning four, five and even six figures per gig. At the same time, producers have seen a drastic reduction in their income. Long gone are the days when even a mediocre dance music 12” would sell thousands of copies, and paltry streaming payments come nowhere close to making up the difference. Although making a decent living as a producer has always been challenging, it’s now something closer to an impossibility, and while the business of electronic music may be thriving, the artists, past and present, whose tunes are soundtracking the party aren’t reaping the benefits.

Aslice sought to directly address that disparity. It provided DJs with an easy-to-use platform where they could plug in their flash drives, upload their tracklists in a matter of moments, input how much money they wanted to share and then let Aslice handle the rest. The technology itself was impressive—the platform boasted a 99.8% matching rate for submitted tracks—yet when it came to public communication, Aslice largely framed its mission in moral terms. Leaning heavily on words like “fairness” and “community,” the “by artists for artists” initiative sought to appeal to DJs’ better angels, hoping that they’d voluntarily take action to preserve the health of the entire electronic music ecosystem.

That strategy, unfortunately, didn’t work. Aslice last week announced that it would be closing, and augmented its sign-off with “A Slice of Fairness,” an independent report by data analysis firm Audience Strategies. That report examines Aslice’s operations, and does it best to put a positive spin on things, but it also provides a bevy of statistics, which make clear just how much the platform struggled to convince DJs to participate. Among “working DJs,” which the report defines as the 15,845 artists with at least one upcoming event on Resident Advisor, only 935 of them (5.9%) shared money through the platform. And of the 2389 total DJs who signed up for Aslice, 1454 of them (60.9%) never bothered to submit a tracklist or share any money. These people had taken the time to create an account and submit their credit card information, and yet they never followed through. Why?

The most direct answer can be found in a quote that was cited in the report:

“You’re asking people to be morally on point and socially responsible. We know most people aren’t.”