This week has seen the demise of Aslice gaat stoppen. Aslice was all about creating a more equal pay for musicians, for a fairer distribution of the revenue from music. Via a community driven structure.
There is a very big discrepancy between the income made by the artists who make the music (producers) and the people making a living out of playing the music (Dj’s). It’s not a coincidence you need to be a DJ/Producer nowadays to generate any income from making music.
The idea was pretty simple, Dj’s send in their playlists and from those lists the producers of the music get a paid an amount for each time a track is played. This means the Dj will make a little bit less, but the producer gets a change to have an income out of their music.
Not all Dj’s are big earners, and many struggle to get a decent wage out of it. You can still read everything there is to know about Aslice and their system om the website. But this brings up a bigger question there is in the arts in general, not just music, but writers, sculptors and painters and so on. All these people have trouble living of just their art. And have all sorts of jobs on the side.
Aslice & the importance of community
The biggest problem (in retrospect) for Aslice was the absence of a lot of Dj’s and mainly the bigger names and highest paid people in the industry. The problem with those people not signing up is that you miss a lot of revenue which should go back to the producers. But also in the lower echelons of the income pyramid it missed the volume to really make a breakthrough.
But why is a more equal distribution important? Everyone can go for their own succes by working on their own channels for revenue? Yes, these are options. The only problem is by doing this individually you can never reach all the corners of the eco system. You simply don’t know if someone is playing your music if they don’t tell you. Instead of being able to let the music work for you after you released it, by letting others play it (in other words sell it), you have to go out there and do this all by yourself. By playing the music yourself or do other activities to sell yourself.
The problem being, there is a limit to what the individual can produce as output. There is a limited amount of time, and energy one can produce. And as a musician this isn’t your job, your job is to make new music. The Aslice system provided a way for musicians to generate income from music when other people went on and did their thing with it. I.e do their job. Making music is not a hobby, as an artist you have to be able to generate income from your music. And not just when you are at the top of the pyramid. Aslice provided a revenue stream without the artists having to put in time to generate it. Passive income.
An eco system can’t function if only a small minority profits at the expense of the work of all the others in the eco system (otherwise known as a community). This inevitably leads to a hollowing out of that system. Artists drop out and no new ones can join. And some point the eco system collapses and a barren land is what is left. You can’t participate if you can’t live from an eco system. It’s that simple.
You can’t reach your full potential if you can’t work on your greatest skill, and have to to all sorts of side hustles to keep afloat.
Individuality & the illusion of succes
This is a problem in the whole of society, in the last 30 years or so this has become the main issue. The belief succes of the individual is solely the outcome of choices and changes that individual has made and taken. Throughout society the illusion that succes is a choice. Whatever is going on outside the circle of influence and the outside world. Just work ‘hard enough’ and seize ‘opportunities’ and you will reap the rewards.
This is only partly true, you can only be as successful as your environment is. Maybe a small percentage can fight their way out of a position of disadvantage, but the first thing they do is leave the place where opportunities are slim.
Succes, for the most part, is the outcome of great communities and solid infrastructures. You simply can’t do everything on your own. A society can’t function without education, health care, affordable living, access to food and so on. These things form the foundation for the individuals to thrive, the access to this infrastructure needs to be organized in such a way, that the majority of participants in these communities have acces to it and be able to use it.
You will have to work on, maintain and build these infrastructures before you can become successful as an individual. Every member needs to make a small contribution to this infrastructure and help others to become successful in order to stay successful themselves. The most well known way to organize this is paying taxes. It’s that simple.
The arts and the revenue model
The world of arts has been plagued by declining in funding the last few decades. All emphasis was placed on building your own revenue models. A lot of subsidies which maintained a lot of the infrastructures, think public venues, studios, art centers and educational systems have been minimized or downright cut all together. Which implicitly meant the art community had to fend for itself. A fairer distribution of the revenue generated with the art becomes crucial.
By subsidizing important parts of the eco system, the money involved becomes almost invisible. People pay taxes for all sorts of things and don’t think about what is funded with the money. This makes a lot of people even wary of paying them. Most people can only think about the stuff they don’t want funded by taxes. That’s why the democratic process is important. But that’s another matter altogether, the simple fact is, the lack of togetherness, which has crept in, in the vast majority of society is also very prevalent in the art world. It wasn’t easy making a living from arts before and it certainly isn’t now. The community in the arts world has vanished.
The revenue stream, and the value broader society has for arts & culture has declined. And therefore the system fails for individual artists to make a living. The revenue model has shifted towards the individual, it’s not the art that needs selling, it’s the individual. Things like the 1000 follower principle, where 1000 people pay 1000 dollars a year and generate an income that way solely hinges on the individual to be able to generate art (or mostly content).
This immediately comes to an halt when that individual has a calamity and can’t make any more music (or content) and the revenue streams stops. There are no safety nets within the system. The most hearth-wrenching examples are the Gofundme pages where artists seek help in paying for cost of living and medical bills ones they fall ill. Nevermind paying for their recovery. Passive revenue from songs played is an absolute necessity.
There is a massive limit in earning power of an individual, this is true for everyone, but especially artists, where art needs to be sold, in this case music played before any revenue is generated. For musicians music played needs to be a valid stream of income. But they can’t live off albums alone anymore. And this is a big risk, it takes a lot of time working on an album and the only way to pay for this time is by the music being played when the music goes out into the world.
Once it’s out there, a lot of the revenue sticks to the top of the pyramid. The balance within the revenue stream is off. A fairer distribution is why a platform such as Aslice is important.
Community back on the agenda
Technology enables us to quickly build a solution which when carried by a large part of the community can restore the balance in revenue pretty quickly. So everyone can carve out their piece of the pie and keep going, and add too the community and eco system. We just need to instill a realization that everyone has their fair value within the eco system. Not just a shout out on social media, but a simple small amount whenever you use a track someone has made. These are not big numbers, it’s about volume.
Technology can help us work out the distribution, the how of the equation. But for things to truly happen we need the majority of the community involved. This can only be reached if we put the topic of the community back on the agenda. Within industry gatherings we not only need to talk about the branding of the artist on an individual level, but talk about a healthy eco system and community as well. How we build, maintain and develop the eco system and subsequently the community.
And not just about the fun stuff, like making music together, collabs with instrument builders and so on, but be frank about the numbers, the accounting behind it all. The “boring” bits. The risks of being a one person company as most artists are. And the risks involved when you do not get paid enough for your work. The bullet points below are just a few of the risks.
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- Insufficient income for health insurance.
- Insufficient income for periods with less gigs, or to buy insurance against income drops.
- Insufficient income for building up a pension.
- Insufficient income for insurance against disability.
And these are just the individual risks, some risks for the eco system
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- No new or improved venues for younger talent to work and perform
- No real networks are maintained as everyone is to busy making ends meet.
- No synergy and scale advantages that a healthy eco system provides for growth and future proofing of the eco system.
It’s not just about money
A community has a lot advantages for people who are part of such an eco system. You can grow your craft a lot faster you can focus on your skillset and not worry too much about other things. Everyone can learn and feed off each other and grow organically. Being part of a community is essential. For these systems to be able to flourish everyone has to contribute some of there time and energy towards that community. In a society this is done via taxes, we then pay other people with other skills to run the eco system. Now the world of arts need to do this themselves. The ‘invisible’ part in the form of subsidies is no longer there. The creative community might have gotten used to this too much, who knows. But in the current political and economical landscape you can’t count on this anymore. The creative community needs to organize this themselves. We need to make sure the eco system is healthy.
The most important thing for people to be able to contribute is that the revenue is divided fairly among the participants, so we can all work on the pillars of the system, such as education, safe spaces to work and crate, get together and interact. So everyone can work on their craft and be able to excel as much as possible and cover the basic risks.
Aslice had a great model to achieve just that. For everyone to be able to make a decent living and thus can dedicate some of their every to build a community in which everyone can work and make a living of their art.
For society as a whole this is very important, as art pays a big part in letting people be able to think critically and provide safe places for people in oppression. As a society we simply can’t progress without art. That’s why the art community has to take a hard look in the mirror and realize the need to work on the eco system and community as absolutely essential.
