In September 2024, Aslice, the revenue-sharing platform dreamed up by Zak Khutoretsky (aka DVS1) shut down. Born in 2022 to fix a broken system, it let DJs share a slice of their earnings with the producers behind the tracks they played. But even in its short life, Aslice exposed the cracks running through electronic music: a royalty system designed for opacity, not fairness.

Rights organizations still struggle to track what actually hits club floors. Many rely on analog methods or incomplete radio playlists. The result: millions vanish into the pockets of a few established names, while the producers generating the culture are left empty-handed. Unreleased tracks (the lifeblood of underground scenes) are invisible to the system entirely, widening the gap between creative output and actual reward.

Out of this chaos emerges Fair Play. Launched in November 2025, its first report, Fair Play: Electronic Music Royalties Under the Microscope – UK, charts the scale of the crisis. Every year, £5.7 million in club royalties are misallocated. Only 36% reaches the rightful artists. In a nightlife industry pulling in £2.4 billion from clubs, festivals, tours, and hospitality, just £3.2 million of £11.25 million flows back to creators.

Technology could fix this, but adoption is minimal. Only 7% of clubs use Music Recognition Technology – about 60 venues, some like Fabric having multiple units. The rest still rely on analog systems that get it right half the time. In the shadows of the dancefloor, the music plays, but the money doesn’t.

These insights come from six months of digging into the performance-rights system, combined with a global survey of 338 stakeholders across 45 countries. For a track to generate the correct payment, it has to survive four checkpoints: coverage and location of the performance, accurate track attribution, creator registration, and licensing/distribution.

Between April and October 2025, Fair Play sent data requests to UK collection societies and MRT providers to verify coverage, attribution rates, and methodologies. Some operational data were off-limits due to confidentiality, so the team also leaned on published tariffs, policy documents, public statements, mathematical assumptions, and the global survey.