Getting paid when a club DJ played your music used to be a straightforward process. Now it has become a lot less so. But thanks to an increasingly popular payment platform called Aslice, a Minneapolis techno DJ with a global profile is doing something about it.

Let’s go back to December of 1976, when Billboard magazine reported that BMI — Broadcast Music, Inc., a performance rights organization — had collected more than $100,000 in payments from more than 900 nightclubs nationwide.

Disco was blowing up, and the clubs where its DJs played the hottest 12-inch singles — a configuration that had arrived in shops only months earlier — were being added to BMI’s rolls at the rate of 10 per week, Billboard reported.

Clearly, disco was a money train for a company like BMI or its rival ASCAP, the other major performing rights organization — PRO for short — that collected performance fees from these new venues.

Here’s how it works: A venue pays an annual fee — in 1976, per Billboard, this ranged from $90 to $980 — to ASCAP and BMI for the rights to host public performances of their copyrighted works. The company takes that fee and apportions it out to its clients; sometimes the percentage was based on a DJ’s playlist, sometimes it was divined in a more arcane fashion.

Now, this system had its pros and cons; notably, the money that wasn’t claimed was often said to be kicked upstairs to a PRO’s bigger clients, who needed it the least. But it was largely a straightforward system that allowed many, whether on small independent labels or majors, to collect what was coming to them.

Time changes everything, especially what DJs play in clubs. There’s still plenty of disco in sets today — but in 1976 it was both at music’s cutting edge and hitting number one on Billboard’s Hot 100. Today, plenty of dance music is miles from the pop charts. And the deficiencies of PROs come forward regarding the kind of underground dance music intended almost solely for DJs — in particular, the kind made and played by Zak Khutoretsky, aka techno DJ and producer DVS1.

Born in Russia and raised in Minnesota, Khutoretsky first became a draw in Twin Cities warehouse events, then regionally, during the late ’90s. Since relocated to Berlin, DVS1 has become a major figure in the international techno scene over the past couple decades. He’s a longtime fixture at Berghain, one of techno’s legendary clubs — but he returns to the Twin Cities frequently, sometimes playing secret warehouse parties. (He discusses the latter in the description of this SoundCloud playlist, which features sets from five other Twin Cities artists: the DJs Berndt, Niki Kitz, and Centrific, plus live hardware sets by Lonefront and Auto Kinetic.)

Khutoretsky has witnessed firsthand the way traditional PROs would routinely reject DJ playlists for insufficient data. “I work with a publisher, who then works with the collection society called PRS in London, which I’m registered [to],” he says. “We went with them because they were the best.

“And yet, my publisher submitted probably 1,200 playlists on behalf of his artists over the course of a year — 2019, before the pandemic. And of those 1,200 playlists, 89 of them were accepted. That’s it. And the reasoning is various things: ‘Oh, it’s not in our database. Oh, it was mistyped. Oh, we don’t trust the source, or that venue.’

“Collection societies were not set up for the DJ world. They were set up for bands. When we moved into the DJ world, they relied on handwritten lists of a DJ to maybe remember the order in which they played their vinyl records that night. OK, there was a fair excuse 20 years ago why that would be difficult — but not working in a digital DJ age where all that information is so readily available. These companies are sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars and haven’t found a solution.”

So Zak did. At first, he wanted to send some money to a few hundred producers as a Christmas gift, but that proved unwieldy — he’d need to build a database. But this germ of an idea gained mass, and emerged in public over a year ago, after another year-plus in gestation, under the name Aslice. (Pronounce it with a long A: ay-slice.)

The way Aslice works is simple. A working DJ donates a percentage of her performance fee (5 percent is the suggested amount) to the people who made the music. Khutoretsky says that Aslice’s “system is affordable to the two-hundred-dollar-a-night DJ, all the way up to the twenty-thousand-dollars-a-night DJ.”

The DJ then submits a tracklist —  automatically generated by many digital DJ interfaces — and the donation is divided up by the number of credited producers, featured artists, and remixers per each night’s setlist. Right now, the minimum donation is ten dollars, or 5 percent of two hundred dollars. (Aslice’s FAQ says the company intends to eventually eliminate any minimums.)

“I saw a problem,” he says. “And coming from Minneapolis, where we’re DIY, we fix things, we do things ourselves — so if there’s a problem, you address it, and you find a solution for it, and you do your best to involve your community in it. I just took that and expanded it, because I’m part of a more global community now, versus my local one.

“This is actually a new ecosystem, self-sustaining, within a community. You know, I hate to use the word ‘mutual aid.’ But it’s people giving to other people and supporting down the line, knowing that that will come back full circle as it goes on.”

The results have been a boon, according to participating DJs and producers. “It keeps money going inside the creative ecosystem, from promoters to the DJs to the producers, who then are able to create more music to play in clubs,” says Martyn, the Dutch-born, D.C.-dwelling DJ, producer, and teacher, who runs the dance label 3024.

Martyn adds that the interface has produced unforeseen benefits, “Producers get a unique type of feedback on their music — seeing which DJs support their music, and where — they weren’t able to receive before. I think this builds up some really interesting connections between musicians and DJs-performers that could benefit both.”

Unlike the iffy math of many traditional PROs, Aslice’s payments have been going to the right places. According to the company FAQ, “Aslice verifies all music by matching playlists against a mix of public and proprietary databases to verify song and artist data. Our intelligent Machine Learning algorithm has also been designed to recognize typos, misspellings and misattributions, and correct them once a track has been matched.”

“I’m not exaggerating when I say we are getting about a 90% match rate,” Khutoresky says with pride. “We look at multiple databases to try and lock in the correct result, and then a human approves that. Unlike collection societies, we can match to music that is unregistered. We can match to music that is unreleased. And we can scrape the entire internet for our results. We find it, match it, verify it, and then pay down the line.”

In DVS1’s case, that’s a lot of matching and verifying. At one event in December, he played tracks by 108 artists over several hours. Though he flew the flag for vinyl as a DJ for years, DVS1 went fully digital “about five years ago,” he says. “I play 120 to 140 shows a year. I went from playing all vinyl; to two turntables and two CDJs; then it was two turntables, three CDJs; then it was one turntable, three CDJs. At some point, I just said, ‘You know what, I’m switching,’ and I went all digital.

“Playing how I play, I don’t play one track into the next. Typically, I layer multiple tracks. Sometimes I’m using small segments and looping them and adding them as a texture. Sometimes I’m just staying in the mix with multiple things for continuous amounts of time, until I run out of time, or need to mix the next thing in.

“If I’m going to use digital, I push my boundaries in the digital world. With digital, the possibilities are greater, so I’m trying to use those possibilities. If I’m going to use technology, I’m going to use it to the greatest point that I can push it.”

Khutoretsky makes his living touring as a DJ, and once upon a time, he could live on producing as well, issuing 12-inches to an audience of mainly other techno DJs. “A record that sells 500 copies today, which I would deem an underground record, would have been 5,000 copies 20 years ago, and 5,000 copies would have generated money for that artist,” he says. “Today, it doesn’t generate anything. It's barely a break-even.

“Now, there is some difference in the digital sales compared to the physical sales. But still, the loss of the physical is not being compensated by the gain in the digital. If you were a full-time producer putting out, let’s say, a record a month, I don’t think you could pay your living off that.”

For many of the music’s producers, the old-school way of getting paid simply doesn’t apply. “Young producers look forward to releasing tunes, but don’t have very much confidence in ever making money through that channel,” says James Patrick, who runs Slam Academy, an electronic-music and DJ school in northeast Minneapolis. “I think the general consensus still gravitates towards making money through playing gigs or licensing. It’s tough out there until you start playing gigs. Gig revenue is still peanuts, but easily exceeds checks from Spotify for most DJ-producers out there.”

Khutoretsky’s central place in the global techno scene meant that DJs in that style adopted the interface readily. A cosign by Richie Hawtin, a global techno star since the ’90s, Khutoretsky says, “generates a domino effect of other users.” Hawtin’s recent From Our Minds warehouse DJ tour featured DVS1 and was co-promoted by Aslice. “We started using Aslice since its inception in September of 2020,” says Hawtin. “I’m a big supporter. It’s a great initiative.”

Aslice is starting to catch on in other musical spheres as well. “In the drum & bass scene, we needed a few key players to come in and use it,” says Khutoretsky. After two London-based drum & bass kingpins, dBridge and Ant TC1, signed on, he says, “Now we start to see drum & bass producers and DJs rolling in because of their visibility.” Aslice is also talking with more mainstream EDM artists, along the lines of Deadmau5.

More than a year past its unveiling, Aslice is still building momentum. “I would say we’re growing about 20% a month,” says Khutoretsky. “We had to naturally let it evolve. We learn from a behavioral standpoint what everyone does, and what they need, what they want, what they appreciate. We’re quietly taking that information and making technical updates, because there’s a whole technical and major development involved with building this, so it’s given us some time to fine-tune things, add more features, slowly pay attention to behavior and answer that behavior with, hopefully, an intelligent feature that’s going to get used by people in the right way.”

He’s even working with some PROs in other countries, attempting to make a dent in the old way of doing things, as well as pointing the way to a new one. “Here I am, nobody, with much less budget than them, no private investment, nothing, and I could turn around and use the technology of the DJ world that’s existed for over 20 years already, and [make] that work to our benefit,” says Khutoretsky.

“The tools are there. And whether or not they want to jump on board, our community can start to fix this internally.”

Learn more at Aslice.com