Richie Hawtin, the electronic music artist and producer, has announced a new partnership with Aslice, a recently launched service that aims to create a fairer music ecosystem by allowing performing DJs to share their fees with the producers who create the music they play in their sets. Hawtin’s ‘From Our Minds – To Be Announced Tour’ will be the first to fully utilize Aslice, with every artist and every date on the tour using the service.
The partnership between Hawtin and Aslice represents the next step in his long-standing commitment to supporting the development of the electronic music scene and his campaign to use technology to create greater equality across all sectors of the industry. Aslice facilitates easy and accurate reporting, and empowers DJs to share earnings with producers directly by donating a portion of their live income, which Aslice distributes to producers played in the set.
Aslice was founded in 2021 by American DJ and producer Zak Khutoretsky (aka Berghain resident DVS1), and has already been described as a “game-changer in the electronic music world that tries to fix the broken system of collection societies.” With the potential to pay an estimated $55 Million annually to music producers, Aslice’s vision moves a step beyond the current performance rights collections model.
The ‘From Our Minds – To Be Announced Tour’ is the latest evolution of Hawtin’s CNTRL tours, which he launched in 2012 and 2015. As EDM was booming across the US, Hawtin toured American college cities by bus, giving a series of performances, lectures, and workshops aimed at educating a new generation of electronic music enthusiasts on the sound and origins of techno music. Today, as techno becomes increasingly popular and commercialized, Hawtin is once again seeking to provide context and nurture the underground, playing intimate warehouse shows with independent promoters, while highlighting a new generation of artists and celebrating the collaborative and cross-generational nature of techno. The partnership with Aslice allows him to further support the music ecosystem and promote greater equality in the industry.