#7 | Notes Keep Playing. Excuses Keep Winning.
The writing reached the right people. The music found a new home. Movement is still the one I keep avoiding.
I wrote something about dopamine culture. How algorithms compressed every category of human experience into its most chemically stimulating form. Music, relationships, communication, attention. All flattened.
Ted Gioia shared it. The man whose chart started the whole conversation. He wrote three words: “The counterculture is already here.”
I stared at that notification for a while. Not because I needed validation. Because for once, the work reached the person it was written in conversation with. That almost never happens.
The full essay lives on my blog.
Two albums are now live on Subvert.fm.
Subvert is a cooperatively owned music marketplace. Artists own the platform. Zero percent platform fees. The opposite of Spotify’s extraction model. I wrote about why this matters and what it means for independent musicians trying to build something that does not depend on someone else’s exit strategy.
Yakın and The Tolerance Trilogy are both streamable there. And here is why Subvert matters.
Publishing music on a platform you partly own feels different than uploading to a service that might get sold next quarter. I cannot explain the difference rationally. But it is there.
The Sound Vault came back to life properly.
Not just playlist curation. Real writing about real music. I found myself spending hours researching artists from regions in conflict. Azam Ali, born in Tehran, raised in India, her voice scattered across Hollywood scores most people have heard without knowing her name. Le Trio Joubran, three Palestinian brothers who built the first oud trio and created a track that stops you mid-scroll. Maurice Jarre’s impossible score for The Message, a film the entire world tried to prevent from being made.
When wars are everywhere on screen and you watch them like a film you cannot pause, I reach for the music of those places. Not to escape. To understand. Notes explain what commentary cannot.
Azam Ali. Le Trio Joubran. Maurice Jarre.
Determination is everything. Moustapha Akkad left Aleppo with two hundred dollars and a Quran and made a Hollywood epic the entire industry tried to stop. That story alone is worth writing about.
The blog is producing at a pace I have never sustained before. Technical reviews, growth strategy pieces, music writing, AI experiments. All documented at muratesmer.com/blog.
I am building things I had no idea how to build six months ago. Claude Code, Replit, APIs I did not know existed. The learning curve is steep but the feedback loop is fast. You write something, deploy it, see it break, fix it, and suddenly you understand something you could not have understood by reading about it.
AI is a large part of this. I have been experimenting heavily. What it does well, where it fails, how it changes the way I think about production and writing and building. I have written about the good and the bad on my blog because I think honest documentation matters more than hype or fear.
The system still works. TickTick holds the structure. The focus blocks hold the days. The eating and sleep changes from months ago are no longer changes. They are just how things are.
Some days the discipline slips. Multitasking creeps in even though I know it is the enemy of deep work. But the framework catches me before I spiral. That is what good infrastructure does. It does not prevent failure. It shortens the recovery time.
And the body.
Still waiting.
The excuses are creative by now. New deadlines. New research. New writing that feels urgent. The truth is simpler. I have not made it non-negotiable yet. Every other system I fixed became real the moment I stopped treating it as optional. Movement is still in the optional category.
I know this. Writing it down again makes it harder to ignore. That is partly why I keep putting it in these posts. Public accountability is uncomfortable. But comfortable got me nowhere for forty years.
I have plans. Better ones than last time. I am not sharing them yet because I have shared plans before and watched them dissolve. When I start, you will know. Not because I will announce it. Because the writing will be different.
This series is not advice. It is documentation.
What is true right now: the notes keep playing. The excuses keep winning.
One of them will stop first.
I appreciate your honesty and self-awareness. It’s inspiring to see someone living a creative path and making real adjustments along the way. Also, your move away from extractive platforms really stands out. Thanks for sharing your process so openly.