50,000 People Later: Why I Started Caught In Joy

Reaching 50,000 people on YouTube feels a little surreal.

Caught In Joy actually started as a side project.

Before this, I spent years as a rock musician and entrepreneur. And somewhere along the way, I realized I couldn’t really find the kind of music I wanted to hear when I needed to cool down my ADHD brain, step away from work, or just drift off somewhere for a while.

A lot of ambient music felt too slow for me. Sometimes simply boring.

And a lot of modern electronic music felt too harsh, too polished, or too disconnected from the part of me that still has an old rock soul.

So I started making the thing I couldn’t find.

Long-form electronic music with movement, melody, atmosphere, and pulse — enough space to disappear into without putting me to sleep, as analog as I could make it, and recorded to tape.

That little side project slowly became Caught In Joy.

Over time it turned into dozens and dozens of albums, long listening journeys, live performances, experiments, and a catalog much bigger than anything I imagined when I started.

What means the most to me is that so many of you actually spend time with this music.

You listen while working. You put it on during long drives. You disappear into it with headphones. You write, read, think, rest, paint, coin new ideas, or sometimes simply sit there and listen.

That matters to me much more than numbers on a screen.

Recently, Music for People Who Are Tired of Being Distracted reached more than 220,000 views in a very short time, and the response was incredible.

The comments especially stayed with me.

So many people seem to be looking for the same thing right now: a place away from notifications, algorithms, endless scrolling, AI slop, and everything constantly demanding our attention.

That has helped me understand Caught In Joy a little better too.

I don’t really want to make “productivity music.”

I don’t want to make disposable background content.

I want to make music you can get lost in.

Sometimes that music is slow, spacious, and meditative. Sometimes it has more pulse and movement. Sometimes it feels like drifting through space, and sometimes it feels like turning the volume up and getting some life back into the room.

But I hope there is always something human in it.

Real instruments. Played by hand. Strange decisions. Imperfections. Accidents. Instinct.

That is the part I care about.

And reaching 50,000 on YouTube feels like a good moment to say thank you.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for leaving thoughtful comments.

Thank you for sharing the music with other people.

And especially, thank you to everyone who has supported Caught In Joy directly by buying albums and complete collections.

Those purchases are not some abstract metric to me. They are what allow me to keep doing this full-time, keep making new music, and keep building this strange little universe without having to turn it into something it was never meant to be.

If you’re new here, welcome.

If you’ve been here for years, thank you for sticking around.

50,000 is a big number, but what I really hope is that Caught In Joy can continue to feel like a small, human place inside an increasingly noisy world.

A place to put on your headphones, turn everything else down, and get lost in music for a while.

Thank you for helping me build it.

— Caught In Joy