The Normalization of Exploitation
In an era when public criticism tends to be both loud and fleeting, the music industry's bad actors simply wait for the outrage to fade—and resignation to set in.
A little more than 13 months ago, Aslice abruptly announced that it would be closing. Headed up by veteran artist DVS1, the initiative sought to address one of dance music’s more glaring economic imbalances, providing DJs with a platform where they could easily share a portion of their earnings with the people whose tunes they’d played in their sets. Publicly launched in 2022, Aslice was endorsed by artists like Richie Hawtin, Dixon and Barker, and also received quite a bit of cautiously optimistic praise from the press, stoking hopes that dance music just might be capable of voluntarily taking collective action that would benefit not just underpaid producers, but the broader health of the culture itself.
Those hopes, however, were ultimately dashed. Within the context of a dance music sphere that had become (and still is) hyper-individualistic and intensely competitive, Aslice was swimming upstream from the very start, and ultimately elected to close its doors before the project had officially reached the three-year mark. Even so, its departure from the stage touched off a torrent of think pieces—including one from First Floor—and social media handwringing about what it all meant. Hawtin was borderline despondent in a video he posted on Instagram, saying that he had “never been so disappointed by [his] DJ friends & colleagues” and that “the famous, most followed DJs of our scene failed us all.” He wasn’t alone in that sentiment, and in the days following the closure announcement, the prevailing dance music discourse was dripping with disappointment, to a point where it was fair to wonder whether or not someone, anyone, might in their frustration pick up where Aslice left off and continue to battle on behalf of the people whose tunes make the whole ecosystem possible in the first place.
Thirteen months later, we’re still wondering.