Richie Hawtin Laments Closure of DJ Revenue Sharing Platform Aslice: ‘Famous’ DJs ‘Failed Us All’
Written by djfrosty on September 10, 2024
Following the recent announcement that DJ revenue sharing platform Aslice is closing, Richie Hawtin has shared his thoughts on the news.
In a 10-minute statement posted to YouTube and social media, the pioneering techno producer expressed his disappointment that many big-name DJs did not participate in Aslice, a donation-based platform launched by DJ Zak Khutoretsky in 2022 that allowed DJs to voluntarily share their set playlists and contribute part of their performance fee to the artists whose music they played.
“The closing of Aslice is a huge disappointment,” Hawtin says. “Perhaps the biggest disappointment that I felt in our community, our scene since I’ve been part of it.”
Last week, the company announced it was closing and released a lengthy report that cited reasons including industry skepticism (“despite outreach to over 2,000 professional DJs, many remained hesitant,” the report says), difficulties the platform faced in gaining widespread adoption, the company’s difficulty in achieving financial sustainability, mixed engagement among DJs, and limited adoption by the leading and most well-played DJs.
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The report notes that “only 4.7% (56) of the top 1,199 DJs on Resident Advisor [with more than five upcoming performances] participated in Aslice.”
Hawtin has a sharp critique for these non-participating DJs, writing in his Instagram caption that “Aslice was working, and the only problem was that not enough DJs, especially the successful ones, agreed to sign up and share back into the music eco-system that they have built their careers on. Aslice did not fail, the famous, most followed DJ’s of our scene failed us all.”
With its closing announcement, the Aslice team said that since launching, they’ve paid out $422,696 to musicians with money from DJs who participated in the platform. They add that all participating artists with remaining balances will be paid out by the end of 2024.
Hawtin shared that since 2021, he has personally paid out €88,950 (roughly $116,268) to the producers whose music he played during his sets, at the expense of what averaged out to be roughly $800 per gig.
Noting that he wasn’t an investor in Aslice, Hawtin explained that it “was a platform that was built to rebalance the economic inequalities that are a big part of our scene. The economic inequalities between how much a DJ or musician and a producer gets paid for the music they make and the money that goes into the pocket of us DJs when we perform playing other people’s music.”
Hawtin said that while most bands perform their own music and earn commensurate royalties, “in our own beautiful scene where we have the largest paid performers playing other people’s music, that system doesn’t work. And it’s only gotten worse as we moved into digital distribution and streaming.”
He added that he’s seen many talented producers stop making music because they couldn’t support themselves and their families by doing it, even though their music might have been getting played by famous DJs in their sets. He says the platform was “a way to recognize the musicians and support the actual foundation of our whole scene. Without music, there’s no DJs.”
Hear Hawtin’s complete statement below.
The Aslice report notes that the platform was an especially vital tool in the electronic music world, given that PROs’ “failure to support the electronic music scene is evident in several key areas,” including, the report says, their technological stagnation, a lack of proactive outreach and community building, complex registration processes, an inability to track unreleased music, outdated distribution models, low accuracy rates, and a lack of retroactive payments for producers who weren’t registered when their music was played.