We spoke with DVS1 at IMS in 2022 about his new company Aslice. Two years later, it announced it’s closing.
RIP then, Aslice, the brainchild of legendary DJ DVS1. In case you missed it, Aslice encouraged DJs to give up a slice of their fee which was then dished out to the producers of the actual tracks the DJs had played in their sets.
Some readers were irate about DJs being expected to give away some of their income, having already bought a track, but this idea came from a good place. A highly-respected DJ didn’t like that so many of the talented people who produce the raw musical building blocks of our scene couldn’t make a living in a world of music streaming and performance royalty organisations that only focused on Top 40 hits. DVS1 put his heart and soul into this and it’s sad to see it fail.
Whatever you think about Aslice, though, it was symptomatic of an industry with unresolved issues. It’s no secret that the streaming model only really functions for major labels, currently, while music downloads are largely reserved for a handful of DJs, and they’re soon to be replaced by on-demand streaming for DJ sets. And even if vinyl does theoretically offer a way to actually earn money from releases, the major labels seem determined to guzzle up 90% of pressing plant capacity to rush out vast ‘limited edition’ runs of Oasis’ second album in time for next year’s MMA (Mixed Marshall Amp) stadium fight tour.
Naturally, people are looking for solutions, so it’s no surprise that in the same month Aslice closed its doors we got wind of a new start-up seeking to boost sales for independent artists. Meet Equa.ls.
The idea is that music fans download the Equa.ls app, browse music, share tracks they like with other listeners, then get 5% commission on any sales their recommendation generates. Why not streaming revenue? Well, at 5% of $0.003 per Spotify stream, a fan would need to generate 666,667 streams to earn $1.
On paper, there’s a nice logic to Equa.ls: motivate engaged fans to share music; encourage a streaming-centric market to actually buy stuff; create a purchase-inclined marketplace for labels and producers to promote their music to (which is, we suspect, where Equa.ls hopes to generate revenue).
Whatever you think about Aslice, though, it was symptomatic of an industry with unresolved issues
So will it work? Let’s look at why Aslice was probably doomed to fail and see what lessons this offers up for Equa.ls. A quick warning, though, this next bit contains a bunch of numbers. If you find they don’t stack up, don’t panic… that’s because you’re reading them right.
To see why Aslice wasn’t a viable solution for an industry where about 100,000 new tracks per day are uploaded to streaming and download sites, and producers can’t make a living, let’s see what would need to happen for a producer to earn $500 per week from Aslice.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s focus on the US and UK alone, and take the generally bandied figure of 11,000 and 5,000 pro DJs, respectively. Let’s also pretend that each of our DJs is playing one hour per week, and earning $500 per week in fees from it. And let’s guesstimate that each DJ plays 15 tracks per one hour set. Oh, and let’s base this on every DJ giving away 10% of their fee for every set.
That’s all pretty optimistic, but let’s see if we can make it work on these generous numbers.
Okay, given all of this, how many club spins would you need to make $500 per week? About 150.
Sounds doable, right? Well, let’s try saying that a few different ways…
– One in every 106 DJs – across all genres – playing one of your tracks every weekend. That’s about 1%.
– Your track played once for every 1,600 songs played in every club, every week. With 700,000 new songs uploaded every week, and hundreds of millions already out there.
Viewed like that, the chances of any individual producer making meaningful revenue appear lottery-like. Unless they’re one of the top-selling producers in the world. Surely Aslice’s best hope was to make upper-tier producers some more cash? And even then, only if our highly optimistic assumptions were true. Was it ever going to work?
So what are the lessons for Equa.ls? Equa.ls takes a different approach, but still relies on a pool of sales which we’re entitled to doubt exists. How excited will music fans be about their 5% when they see what that means in an industry where you can reach top spot on some genre Beatport Release charts with just 50 sales? That would net a music fan a penny or less (which is a penny more than the artist would get as most labels don’t actually pay out for invoices that are less than £100).
Surely Aslice’s best hope was to make upper-tier producers some more cash? Was it ever going to work?
We have to ask: Is there really a plausible way for 99.9999% of producers to make a living out of today’s model? And if not, should we stop pretending there could be? Otherwise there’s no impetus to actually change things. It feels a bit like somebody accepting that global warming is happening but kidding themselves that there’s a way to stop it that doesn’t involve giving up cheap flights and five-minute drives to the shops.
If all of this seems overly negative about the industry, it shouldn’t. Most of us started making music for pleasure, with no dreams to make it our living. Being a pro producer was always a lucky privilege, and still is. The only thing that’s changed is the nature of the obstacles and the barriers.
Besides, there are plenty of benefits. In the past you needed a studio and a record deal to share your music. This was a huge barrier to millions, whether it was women who didn’t want to run the gauntlet of a patronising and predatory studio / label system, or people in parts of the world where there was no access to studios or globally-reaching distribution. Today there are countless amazing artists, both at home and abroad, who simply would not have been on our radar in years gone by.
But all that said, if we accept that there are some serious inequalities of revenue distribution in the industry, perhaps it’s time we started being a bit more honest about our own contribution to that. Sure, the industry was always a bit of a closed shop that favoured the major labels, but now we actually have the technology to challenge that. The question we need to ask is, can that really be done without us sacrificing something we’ve become accustomed to, namely universal catalogues on demand while spending next to – if not actually – nothing?
For more information, read the full report ‘A Slice of Fairness’ on the closure of Aslice.
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