All posts by scott truitt

Posted on Nov 24, 2025 at 11:52 by scott truitt

YouTube is full of ads.  Subscribe to YouTube Premium.  Spotify is full of ads.  Subscribe to Spotify Premium.  Both still track you and sell your data.  But you can’t stop that.  Everything has an ad  in front of it,  over top of it,  sandwiched in the middle of it.  Unskippable ads.  Unescapable bullsh!t. Accept our privacy policy so we can share data with our 837 business partners.  Accept our cookie policy so we can follow you everywhere and manipulate everything you see.  Everything h

Posted on Aug 11, 2025 at 13:10 by scott truitt

The dominant social and streaming services created a model in which only a handful of companies benefit from the creation and consumption of all music.

Posted on Aug 8, 2025 at 09:01 by scott truitt

Of all the things that make me happy about our new site, the one that tops them all is the Network effects visualisation.

Posted on Aug 6, 2025 at 08:49 by scott truitt

Thanks to all who responded with feedback yesterday, whether with issues or encouragement. It’s always gratifying to see the people I care about most notice our work, even when we fall short. Note to self: Always test again after deleting a domain configuration that seemed irrelevant before emailing and posting widely. That’s why the images weren’t loading and the links didn’t work. It should be good now. I wanted to mention something about the messaging on the new site, particularly on th

Posted on Aug 5, 2025 at 12:18 by scott truitt

If you’re reading this on foreplai.com (now sawtooth.ing after our name change), you’re seeing our new site and our refreshed blog now running on Ghost(Pro). And if you received this post via email, that’s because I migrated our email lists to Ghost. You may unsubscribe below. Until today, I posted almost exclusively on LinkedIn first. It never felt like the best place for it, but it was simply where most of my network was after I quit Twitter in 2022. I tried WordPress, which was what I ran in

Posted on Apr 5, 2025 at 23:00 by scott truitt

Ad-supported and subscription-based monetisation business models punish the music industry, especially indie artists and labels, for its success. How? Both limit how much money artists, labels, and rights holders can earn on their music. Why? It’s more profitable for Spotify and the like to collect money from everyone and reduce artists, labels, and rights holders to fighting for leftover scraps in a royalty pool model. They also hurt users, but we’ll cover that one next. Let’s dig in. Ad-

Posted on Apr 5, 2025 at 23:00 by scott truitt

No restaurant can legitimately sustain an all-you-can-eat buffet for £11.99 per person per month. This business model can only work by shifting the cost of serving unlimited food to their workers and suppliers. In other words, the restaurant can only profit when everyone else loses, including its customers, who likely receive substandard meals and an awful experience to make the numbers work. Does that sound familiar? Because that’s what’s happening with streaming music. Artists and labels ear

Posted on Apr 4, 2025 at 06:23 by scott truitt

Sawtooth is an idea I first had in the early 2000s, and it even has some elements of a project I wrote for Warp Records in 1999. It has since expanded and evolved, but the core ideas remain. It all started one afternoon at my home in Columbus, Ohio, when I sorted my iTunes library by how many times I played each song. I quickly realised I had played my favourite tracks over a hundred times. And yet, I spent at most the cost of a CD, $9.99 for the album, or 99¢ for a song. (I was never much for