Dear Music,

Dear music,

I’ve been thinking a lot about when we first met.

Piano lessons, mostly. A bench that was a little too high. Your weight under my fingers. You knew I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew that sitting with you felt different than sitting with anything else.

You were patient with me. You let me be bad. You taught me to stay. To listen.

And I listened. Not just to your sound, but to what you did to people. How you shaped rooms. How you moved culture. How taste traveled through you before anyone had language for it.

Through you, I learned how to dress. And how to undress. How to belong without asking. How to carry memory in noise, and timing. How to speak before I knew what I wanted to say.

You followed me everywhere. You kept changing shape, but you never really left. You got smaller. Easier to carry. Easier to ignore. People started treating you like furniture. Like wallpaper. Like air.

And then somewhere along the way, they put a price on you. A small one. $12.99 a month for all of you. Past, present, future. Flattened. Like a utility you plug in the wall.

Now, I know it’s been a rough year.

They talk about you like you can be cloned. Summoned. Skipped to the end of. Like getting to know you was optional. Like your personality is an inefficiency. Like you’re replaceable.

You never felt replaceable to me, Music. You were a relationship. One I invested in.

That’s the part I miss. That’s the part I’m staying loyal to. Not by defending you or mythologizing you, but by building things that don’t rush past you. Things that slow people down just enough to feel you working on them. Things that feel like you.

So I started a company and named it after the last place we were really together.

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya.

This isn’t nostalgia. I just don’t want you frozen in amber. I don’t want you skipped. I don’t want people to miss knowing you because it’s inconvenient or unscalable. I want to build things that choose you.

And I wanted you to know I’m still here. Still in it. Still committed. I think a lot of us are.

We got you, Music.