Aslice, a music revenue-sharing platform launched by DJ and producer DVS1 (Zak Khutoretsky) in 2022, has announced its permanent closure. It encouraged DJs to report setlists and pay a percentage of their fee to the artists they played—a variant of Germany’s GEMA-Vermutung.
The platform helped distribute over $422,000 to more than 27,000 composers from 57 countries. Meanwhile, Aslice ran at a loss due to high operational costs.
DJ and label head Sam Barker called Aslice “the last hope for dance music producers in this comically unfair economy,” explaining that it ceased operations because “many of the highest-paid DJs in the world decided not to contribute.”
Dumas wrote, “All for one and one for all, united we stand, divided we fall.” Whether it’s music, cinema, war, AI, or climate change… The Coordination Problem remains humanity’s main threat.
From 27 years of creative work with thousands of people, I’ve learned that local maxima are hard-coded in most of us: the prisoner’s dilemma, the free-rider problem, the hyperbolic discounting, or the tragedy of the commons… No amount of culturing will help.
Without re-coding our DNA, we may never overcome these built-in barriers to rational behavior.
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