Why I Built a Music Platform From My Cafe in Northern Michigan

The alarm goes off at 5:15. Not because I have to be anywhere — the cafe doesn't open until seven — but because there's an hour and a half between the alarm and the first customer, and that hour is mine.

Charlevoix is quiet at that time of day. The town is small enough that you can hear the water from the parking lot. In the summer, the sun is already thinking about rising, and by the time I unlock the door and flip on the back lights, the first edge of it is touching the lake.

I don't turn on the music right away. There's a few minutes where I just let the room be what it is. Chairs stacked. Counter wiped down. The espresso machine warming up — that low, building hum that's the closest thing to a heartbeat a building has. The light off Lake Michigan starts coming through the front windows. On the right morning, in June or July, the room fills with this pale gold that makes everything look like it's been dipped in honey.

Then I pick up my phone. And for fifteen, sometimes twenty minutes, I try to find the sound.

The twenty-minute scroll

I want to be clear about what I mean by "try to find the sound," because it's not what most people think. I'm not looking for my favorite songs. I'm not making a playlist for a road trip. I'm trying to find music that matches a very specific, very hard-to-describe feeling — the feeling of my room, at this hour, with this light, for the people who are about to walk through the door.

That feeling changes. A Tuesday in March, when it's gray and sleeting and the room needs to feel like a warm coat, is different from a Saturday in July, when the windows are open and the breeze is coming off the lake and the room should feel like it's barely trying. The music needs to follow that. Not dictate it. Follow it.

So I'd scroll. Past the algorithmic suggestions, which had a strange knack for surfacing music I liked in my car but hated in the cafe. Past the "Chill Morning" playlists that sounded like they'd been assembled for a dentist's office. Past the artist radio stations that were fine for thirty minutes and then played something with lyrics about a breakup, which is not the energy you want at 7:15 AM in a breakfast cafe.

I'd skip. Start a track, listen for eight seconds, skip. Start another. Skip. Sometimes I'd land on something and think: yes, that's it. And then the next song would be wrong, and I'd be back to scrolling, and now there's a customer at the counter and I'm holding my phone instead of making their latte.

This is a small, stupid problem. I know that. Nobody's life depends on the background music at a cafe in northern Michigan. But small problems that happen every single day aren't small. They're the texture of your life. And this one was eating a chunk of every morning that I wanted back.

What the room was supposed to sound like

Here's the thing I could never quite articulate to anyone, including myself, until I'd spent enough mornings failing at it: I wasn't looking for good music. I was looking for right music.

Good music is everywhere. My phone is full of it. Albums I love, artists who move me, songs that have been important to me for decades. But good music and right music are different things. An incredible song can be completely wrong for a space. A track with no particular brilliance can be exactly what the room needs.

What I wanted was music that sounded like my cafe felt. Warm. Unhurried. A little rough around the edges — not polished to the point where it feels sterile, but not sloppy either. Something with texture. Acoustic instruments mixed with something electric, maybe. A sense that a human being made choices about every note, even if nobody in the room is paying close attention.

I wanted music that made the room more itself. Not music that competed with the espresso machine or the conversation at table four. Music that sat underneath everything like good lighting — shaping the experience without announcing its presence.

The commercial music services I tried understood half of this. They understood "background music." They understood categories — jazz, acoustic, indie, lo-fi. What they didn't understand was that a category isn't a feeling. "Jazz" is a thousand different things. So is "acoustic." What I needed wasn't a genre. I needed to say: Sunday morning, slow, golden, warm, a little rough around the edges. And have something play that sounded like that sentence felt.

None of them could do that. The closest I got was a service that cost real money — premium tier, roughly $500 a year — and delivered music that was fine. Technically fine. The kind of fine where you never complain but also never notice. It sounded like music that had been assembled by a committee of people who had never stood behind a counter at dawn and felt the room ask for something specific.

The app was clunky. The per-device fees punished small operators like me — every speaker, every tablet, another line item. And the selection rotated the same forty tracks until I could recognize them by their opening bars, which is the moment background music stops being background.

The licensing headache

Around this time, I started learning about how music licensing actually works for businesses. I wish I could say I sought out this information proactively. What actually happened is I got a letter.

There are three performing rights organizations in the United States — BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC. Each one represents a different pool of songwriters and publishers. When copyrighted music plays in a business, these organizations are owed a fee. Each one. Separately. Three organizations, three invoices, three renewal cycles.

For a small cafe, the total runs somewhere between $750 and $1,500 a year, on top of whatever you're paying for the music itself. And here's the part that kept me up at night: even with all three licenses, you're never entirely sure you're covered. A song plays that's registered with a PRO you didn't know about, or a cover version has a different rights holder than the original, and you're technically in violation without having done anything wrong.

I don't want to dwell on this — other posts on this site go deep on the licensing landscape. But it matters for the story, because the licensing maze is what made me realize the answer wasn't finding a better music service. The answer was different music entirely. Music that didn't live inside that system at all.

So I built it

The idea, when it first formed, was simple enough to fit on an index card: a library of original music, composed for real spaces, where every track is new and unregistered with any PRO. No BMI affiliation. No ASCAP. No SESAC. One subscription, one license, done.

The music is AI-generated. I want to be straightforward about that, because it matters — not as a selling point, but as the mechanism that makes everything else possible. AI generation means every track is original. It means no one else holds the rights. It means the licensing question that haunts every small business playing music simply doesn't exist here.

But here's what I didn't expect: the music is beautiful.

Not "good for AI music." Not "surprisingly decent." Beautiful. Warm, textured, alive. Piano pieces that sound like someone is playing them in the next room. Guitar tracks with the kind of gentle imperfection that makes you lean in. Ambient compositions that fill a space the way morning light fills a space — gradually, without effort, changing the room without anyone noticing when it happened.

The library grew. A hundred tracks. Then five hundred. Then a thousand. Now thousands, and growing every week. Each one tagged not just by genre but by feeling — warm, moody, golden, airy, intimate, expansive. The kind of vocabulary that a person uses when they're describing what a room should feel like, not what a music library should contain.

I named it Puana (poo-AH-nah). It's Hawaiian for "the opening note of a song" — the first sound, the one that sets everything in motion. In Hawaiian musical tradition, the puana is also the refrain, the part that carries the meaning. For a business, that's what the right music does. It sets the tone for everything that follows.

What surprised me

I built Puana to solve a problem. Twenty minutes every morning, wasted. Licensing anxiety. Per-device fees. Music that was fine but never right. Those were the problems, and Puana fixed them. I expected that. That was the point.

What I didn't expect was what happened to the room.

The first morning I used it in the cafe — not testing, not tweaking, just using it the way a customer would — I typed something like "early morning, quiet, warm, a little golden" and pressed play. A piano track started, something slow and slightly uneven, like someone was playing for the pleasure of it. Then it crossfaded into something with a soft acoustic guitar and a faint ambient pad underneath.

I made coffee. I wiped down the tables. I didn't touch my phone.

Twenty minutes passed. The music was still right. The room felt like it was breathing at the right tempo. A customer came in, sat down with her laptop, looked up for a second — that kind of brief, unconscious glance people give when a space feels unexpectedly good — and then went back to her screen.

That glance. That was the moment I understood what I'd built.

It wasn't just that the music was better, or that I'd saved twenty minutes, or that the licensing headache was gone. It was that when the music is exactly right and you never have to think about it, something shifts. The space becomes more itself. You stop managing the atmosphere and start inhabiting it. The cafe felt more like the cafe I'd always imagined it could be — not because anything physical changed, but because the invisible layer, the one most people can't point to, was finally correct.

I've talked to restaurant owners who describe the same thing differently. They say the energy of the room changes. A hotel manager told me her lobby felt "calmer but more alive" after switching, which sounds like a contradiction but isn't — it's what happens when the music stops fighting the space and starts completing it.

Every space has a sound

This is the part of the essay where I'm supposed to broaden the lens, and I will, but I want to be honest about my motivation first: I built Puana for myself. For my cafe, my mornings, my specific and probably unreasonable standards about what music should sound like at 6:30 AM in a small town on Lake Michigan.

But the thing about a specific problem is that it's rarely actually specific. Every business that plays music — every cafe, every restaurant, every hotel lobby and coworking space and retail store — has an owner who either cares about the atmosphere or doesn't. The ones who don't are playing whatever's cheapest or most convenient, and their spaces feel like it. The ones who do are spending twenty minutes every morning scrolling, or paying $2,000 a year for music they tolerate, or playing their personal Spotify and hoping nobody notices.

There's a version of the right music for every space in the world. A boutique hotel in Austin has a different frequency than a ramen shop in Brooklyn. A yoga studio in Portland wants something the wine bar next door would never play. And none of them should have to choose between music that sounds right and a licensing structure they can actually navigate.

That's what Puana is, underneath everything. A belief that every space has a sound it's supposed to make, and that finding it shouldn't require a music degree, a licensing attorney, or twenty minutes of scrolling every morning before the doors open.

The morning after

I still get to the cafe early. That hasn't changed. I still love the quiet before the doors open — the hum of the espresso machine, the light moving across the floor, the particular silence of a room that's about to become something.

What changed is what happens next. I open Puana. I type a sentence — sometimes just a word or two, sometimes something longer if the morning has a specific character I want to chase. I press play. And then I make coffee. I put out the pastries. I flip the sign.

The music plays. The room fills. The light off Lake Michigan does its thing.

I don't touch my phone again until the first customer asks if I can break a twenty.

Some mornings, when the light is right and the music is right and someone at the corner table looks up from their book with that expression — the one that says I don't want to leave this place — I think about how long I spent trying to get here. How many tracks I skipped, how many playlists I abandoned, how many mornings I settled for fine.

The room sounds the way it was always supposed to. It just took me a while to figure out how to let it.

Jesse Meria is the founder of Puana and the owner of Cafe Meria in Charlevoix, Michigan. Puana (poo-AH-nah) means "the opening note of a song" in Hawaiian. He built it because his cafe deserved music as considered as the coffee.