Rekordbox, the popular DJ software from AlphaTheta (formerly Pioneer DJ), is facing a significant outage of its subscription management system. These issues surfaced on 25 January 2025 and continue to affect users as of now.
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Users of Rekordbox have experienced a variety of subscription-related hurdles, including difficulties in purchasing new subscriptions and modifying existing ones, inability to cancel current plans, unexpected cancellation notices being sent out, and erroneous warning messages about expiring subscriptions.
On 31 January, AlphaTheta acknowledged the server issues affecting Rekordbox subscription services in an official statement, and reassured users they are working on a solution. However, no timeline for fixing the problem has been provided.
AlphaTheta’s response
An AlphaTheta spokesperson told us: “We are working hard behind the scenes to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
“We can confirm only customers with a subscription are affected, customers using free rekordbox for Hardware Unlock are unaffected.
“Current subscribers can now access all of the features without any issues and from this week current subscribers will be able to cancel subscriptions if they wish.
“Our engineering team are focused on implementing a new payment provider ASAP.”
DJ community reaction
Unsurprisingly, the ongoing issues have led to frustration among DJs, particularly in light of AlphaTheta’s recent decision to require subscriptions for some older equipment to use Rekordbox 7, as well as recent reports of more intrusive pop-ups in the software urging hardware unlock users to subscribe.
This has only added to the community’s current debate around the reliability and future of subscription-based models for essential DJ software, and frustration over the way DJ software is priced and charged for more generally. It is a topic we suspect we will be returning to more and more throughout 2025.
AlphaTheta’s statement in full
Phil Morse
