The origins of Sawtooth

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 file sharing.)I remember thinking about how much these songs meant to me. And I remember thinking it was absurd that my favourite artists earned so little from me at the time of purchase and nothing over a lifetime of enjoyment. If anything, these songs were and are more valuable with each passing day than when I bought them.

On top of that, I often swapped music with my brother and friends. Back then, that meant sending files back and forth, either the “upload to a download site” dance that sucked all the fun out of it or burning a CD. We even briefly had a Zip drive phase.

However, I was stealing from artists again, even though I only wanted more people to hear the music I loved most. It was at this moment that it dawned on me:

1. Every song should have a URL.

2. Every song should cost a small but still significant amount of money to play.

Think about it. These core ideas meant music could flow anywhere and everywhere, and anyone who listened to it would pay artists fairly. Spotify and YouTube solved the first problem, but they neglected to pay artists much, if anything at all.

That’s the back story of Sawtooth and our “fair pay for every play” model.