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Paper short abstract

Against platform-driven devaluation of music, the platform ASLICE prompted performing DJs to share income with musicians. This paper analyses the initiative as a social technology that sought to anticipate a fairer music economy and relational egalitarianism.

Paper long abstract

The contemporary music economy has increasingly become organised through streaming corporations and platform logics that have rendered the value of music itself negligible —especially in underground segments and marginal scenes. ASLICE, a digital platform initiative that had been active for two years before closing down in late 2024, sought to intervene in this trajectory by redistributing value in the electronic music ecosystem. It prompted DJs to allocate a share of their income to producers whose tracks they perform. As a grassroots proposition put forward by a vanguard visionary (Hilgartner 2015) together with a discourse coalition (Hajer 1993) in the underground music scene, and implemented through minimal technical means, the initiative looked to reorganise compensation relationally, anticipating solving inequity through newly facilitated and multiplying direct linkages between performing and producing music artists. As such, my paper examines ASLICE as a social technology which attempted to prototype an alternative, more egalitarian economic order within platformised music culture. I show that the initiative employed a technological frame while simultaneously invoking a community ethos, ascribing the roles different groups of users (Akrich 1992) ought to exercise in realising this anticipated future. At the same time, the platform’s closure illustrates the weight carried by non-users (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003) in particular and the limits of attempts to reconfigure platform economies through community-driven infrastructures generally. The empirical material consists of multiple semi-structured expert interviews and fieldwork undertaken at an industry-specific conference.