Michael Walker: Yeah. Hmm. All right. Excited to be here today with my new friend, Inder Phull. Inder is an award-winning CEO/co-founder of Pixelynx and KOR Protocol. He's raised and generated over $40 million, recently selling his company to Animoca Brands. He's a visionary at the intersection of music, gaming, and blockchain.

He's led sellout projects with brands like Black Mirror, Beatport, and Pioneer DJ. He has over a decade of experience working with companies you might've heard of like Disney, and he's helping to shape the future of the metaverse. So man, I'm really excited to have you on the podcast today to talk about what it looks like to be a modern musician, specifically in the realm that we're entering with AI, music, blockchain, gaming—where that all kind of intersects. So Inder, thank you for taking the time to be on the podcast today.

Inder Phull: Great to be here, Michael. I've been looking forward to this and yeah, a big fan of everything you guys do. Looking forward to sharing some insights and hopefully some useful tips and more.

Michael: Heck yeah. Let's go. So Inder, maybe for anyone that this is the first time they're meeting or connecting with you, could you share a little bit of an introduction to yourself and how you found yourself at the intersection of working with companies like Disney and Black Mirror and talking about blockchain and music and gaming?

Inder: Yeah, it's a long journey, I guess, in some sense. I'll try to keep it concise. I've always been a fan of music and culture from a young age. I was born in Africa, in Nairobi, moved to London when I was about 10.

Very early on I got into music and creative culture more than anything. I kind of just loved forms of expression. I think I set up my first business when I was 16. I was DJing, which is a common path for a lot of people—just DJing at parties and for friends and kind of always had this entrepreneurial bug. My family are entrepreneurs. My dad ran his own business. His dad ran his own business. So I think it was always a rite of passage that at some stage I would be thinking about that.

But the early years I was just very much into music, into creative culture. I was skateboarding. I remember I was in university and I was studying economics, and I was like, this is really not for me. This is not that exciting, it's not really what I'm into—although it's interesting. And I started to go down this journey of thinking about startup culture and what I would really want to build.

Around that age—early twenties—I was doing videography. I was doing a lot of experimental things. I remember I was thinking about brands—this was in my early twenties, maybe 20 years old—thinking about brands and how they would come into places like skate parks, where I would be active, and try to make themselves present and advertise their products to my generation and people that I was connected to. And I was like, there's just something that doesn't feel right. There's this disconnect between these companies and how they're trying to speak to younger audiences.

That was one of the first starting points of my first proper business, which was an agency connecting brands to youth culture. That was sort of the early stage. I didn't really know where exactly it was going to go. I used to message people on LinkedIn—just cold message like, “Hey, this is this project I’m working on.” And one of my first clients was Lacoste. After a few months of messaging people, I suddenly had this client that paid me more in one brief than I was getting paid in a whole year of a different job. So I was like, okay, maybe there’s something in this.

Through that journey, I was working with brands, started to connect with a lot of big global organizations, and helped them think not only about how they could connect with youth culture, but also how they could use technology to transform the way they market to younger audiences. I really got excited about innovation.

This was a point in my life where I’m making music, I’m skateboarding, I’m DJing, and I’m also trying to figure out my career—working with these organizations. So I was always in this intersection, in many ways, of culture and technology. That was some of the early stages.

When I was around 23 or 24, I won an award called the International Music Summit Visionaries Award. In order to apply, you had to present a vision for the future of the music industry. This was about 10 years ago. I shared ideas around how things like blockchain and gaming could present new ways for people to not only monetize, but also grow their career, manage their intellectual property, and have transparency.

It was just very early stages of exploring things in the world and trying things out. Anyway, I ran this agency for many years and got more into the innovation side of things. I discovered blockchain probably about 10 years ago. There was an artist called Imogen Heap who was doing some very early work in the space, showing how this technology could not only help her monetize more effectively but also have transparency over her intellectual property.

It completely inspired me. It was such a clear solution for a problem that existed. But I didn’t really think much of it. I just continued studying the space—it was still very early. What happened was COVID hit maybe a few years later, and I saw the whole music industry collapse in many ways. I was thinking about what my next step would be—where I would want to go in the future.

It was like this connection of things I was passionate about: blockchain, gaming, interactivity, working with creators, musicians, and brands. That was really the long-winded journey effect from the skate parks, to making music, to ultimately working with big brands and trying to help them solve their problems.

I got to see so many different parts of culture—from the technology, to the corporates, to the creators. For me, it was like, how do I fuse these pieces together? That ultimately led me to Pixelynx, which is what we're building today: an interactive ecosystem focused on bringing intellectual property on the blockchain and unlocking new forms of revenue and monetization, which we'll get into.

But yeah, that’s the long and short of how I view that journey.

Michael: Oh man, that's so cool. Oh, watch Imogen Heap. Yeah. Sorry. As soon as you said Imogen Heap, like that song, I'm just like, start playing. So cool. So the first thing that comes up is, you mentioned that you won an award for kind of casting a vision for the music industry and where things are headed as it relates to blockchain and gaming.

So, the next question that comes up for me is sort of like, what were the core principles of that vision that you described? And I'm also curious to hear your perspective as this relates to the current state of the music industry and some of the common challenges and the problems. Maybe you could share a little bit about your diagnosis of what's, what are the biggest issues right now, and then cast that vision towards what you're building.

Inder: Yeah. I mean, obviously there's so many challenges to solve, but the core idea was called Hobby to Pro, and my first perspective was the more people we get into the craft of making music, the better it's gonna be for the music industry. The more people who appreciate music as a hobby, whether it's just DJing or making music, I really think this is gonna unlock a really amazing future. If we have more people who make music, they will appreciate it more, and they'll support the industry.

I think there was a very clear, for me, a really clear relationship between the two. So that was one of the first high-level ideas. It was this vision, like, if you can just start off with a hobby, it can turn into a profession. That's great. It doesn't need to. But the job of getting more people into the music industry to just make music as a hobby is a really important thing that I really believed in.

And then beyond that, there were a number of other things that I was interested in. This was at a point in time—which is still like now—artists don't really have much transparency around their music. And even more importantly, the intellectual property behind music, the way it's managed, is really complex. A song could have dozens of songwriters, labels, publishers involved, producers involved, and that creates so much fragmentation that makes it really difficult for music to really grow.

I believe that blockchain could be this amazing solution for that. It could be this technology that would allow us to think about our intellectual property in a more controlled way, and to then enable things like partnerships and collaborations and licensing and new forms of distribution, as well as giving artists transparency.

To me, that was really important. One big problem we have is that the music rights landscape is incredibly complex, and the blockchain infrastructure could be an amazing solution—not only to help untangle that, but also give artists transparency and a more interesting way to potentially monetize and connect with their fans.

Some of the other principles included interactivity. I was thinking a lot about gaming and the idea that new mediums of consumption, like games and gamified experiences as a whole, could not only get more people into the craft of making music, but could also be this incredible new revenue stream. It could be this new canvas in many ways for artists to think about their craft—not only just releasing songs, but releasing audio-visual experiences that maybe 10 years ago were out of their reach because the technology wasn't really there and it was expensive.

But if we invested into these features, we could give artists a much broader canvas to express their visions. An artist could be more than just a songwriter or a musician but could actually have multimedia experiences that are essential to the way they present their vision.

So those were some of the main things. Hobby to Pro: let's get more people into the beautiful craft of making music. That will help them appreciate it more, which should have a knock-on effect on the industry. Blockchain infrastructure is really important to protect rights and to create new ways for us to think about intellectual property. And gamification could be this amazing new set of tools and mediums for us to release music through. That would be really cool.

I think I also spoke about sustainability and a few other things that were also very pressing and still are today. But those were the ones that really stuck with me as a whole up until now and directly relate to a lot of the things that I'm doing today.

Michael: Very cool.

Inder: Always amazing as well—just to touch on it—when I won that program, which is why I think these things are so important, I was relatively unknown in the music industry. I didn't have a name for myself. I was 24. This put me on a platform but also connected me to my business partners today.

Ben, for example, who was the founder of this conference, became a mentor of mine. Over many years we shared ideas and now end up running a business together. He manages Richie Hawtin, who's an amazing DJ and producer. Through that, I got connected with Deadmau5 and Dean Wilson, who's Deadmau5's manager.

So it was an amazing foundation for me—not only being able to present a vision, but also to get connected with a lot of the key people really moving the space forward. Those basically helped mentor and push my career into where it is today.

Michael: Hmm. Super cool. Yeah. I mean, when did you write that? The article or when did you submit for that contest?

Inder: It's a video. You can find it if you type in "Inder Phull Visionaries Mixmag," I believe. Let me see. It was like, maybe more than 10 years ago. Let’s see. Wow. Mixmag… let’s see, when is it? 2016. Okay. So nine years ago, I guess.

Michael: Yeah, that's pretty prescient to be able to forecast that ahead of time. Some of those ideas, I feel like, are maybe more on the surface now. But just to recap, make sure I'm hearing you correctly. So really, the three big ones that stand out are:

1. Creating easier platforms for people to just create music in the first place—to go from hobbyists to professionals and making it easier. Which, oh my gosh, now especially compared to when you initially submitted, now that we have SUNO and Udio and the capabilities are increasing every day for what people can create.
2. Blockchain as a tool for having more transparency around your rights and making it easier to collaborate. And gosh, I mean, you can't get a lot more opaque than a black box that you have no idea what's on the inside. It's crazy. Every time I hear someone who knows what they're talking about talking about this, I'm like, what? That's insane.

So, having the ability to use a tool like blockchain to add more transparency and allow people to collaborate more.

Inder: Gaming, like gamification and interactivity, I think was a big one. Thinking about that side of things.

Michael: In gaming and interactivity. So yeah, both in terms of actually having what we traditionally think about like video games, but also just having interactivity and the ability to gamify the overall fan and music experience. Really cool. So yeah, I would love to hear what you're personally most excited about that you're building right now with Pixelynx as it relates to one of those three things.

Inder: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stuff happening in the ecosystem. What we're developing is the KOR Protocol, which is an IP infrastructure for basically bringing intellectual property on the blockchain.

So whether you are a songwriter or an artist, or whether you are a TV show and franchise like Black Mirror, the tools basically let you register your assets—those could be songs or scripts—and first of all, claim ownership over them, which is really important, right? These are your assets, so register them.

And then from there, we basically enable new use cases. So we can enable remixing, where an artist like Imogen Heap is letting people remix her music right now, and you can then even own a piece of that song and potentially commercialize it, with royalties going back to the original artist. And it's her rights managed on the blockchain with a very seamless way for people to remix and co-create using some tools we've made.

And that's one of the things that I'm really excited about. KOR Protocol is the infrastructure, and then an application called Chorus that's built on top of it lets people remix.
 That's very exciting, right? It's such a cool future for fans to be able to become creators and collaborators, and then also potentially—if you want to make it a career—to actually have the ability to monetize your collaboration with that artist.

Super cool. And that's all enabled by the protocol, so all on the blockchain.

Some other things that I'm really excited about—we're working with the Black Mirror franchise, and we'll be launching a whole ecosystem of things around Black Mirror and the IP and doing a lot of music collaboration. So again, it's like, how many artists, musicians get to collaborate with Black Mirror?

None, in the grand scheme of things. Maybe a handful if you're lucky and your song got put into a show through sync. But what if you could create your own episode, and you had the rights to do something creative with that IP—like make a song around it or make an experience?

Again, it's largely out of reach for the world to do that. And what we're doing through the blockchain is making it easy and seamless. Black Mirror can set their rules and say, "People can do this, this, and this," and that means a developer or a creator can come and actually build on top of that IP and have this ability to collaborate with them in a really fun way. So it's a collaboration ecosystem at its core. And I think that's really what I'm excited about—allowing people to collaborate and work together and to share value in a way that is not held back by all this fragmentation. Weeks of negotiations or legals and contracts, and labels might hold things back.

It's like you can just do it. It's on the blockchain, and it's ready for you to remix.

So yeah, I would say that's something that I'm super excited about: the potential of what happens when we get more IP on the blockchain and more creators and developers building on top of it and showing all these new ways to build things in a collaborative environment.

Michael: Mm-hmm. Wow, that is so cool. I feel like it's especially important as we're entering this age of more and more immersive digital experiences. I know Meta released their Project Orion glasses, and that was kind of a big breakthrough. And it seems like we're not very far away from having more immersive virtual reality kind of experiences. And that seems like that's when digital assets really become more... they feel more real, I guess.

Where it seems like in a lot of cases, when we're thinking about digital assets, they're sort of abstracted, or it seems like it's not real because it's in digital space. But when we can actually interact and experience those things in real life, it starts to get really clear. Man, Black Mirror collaboration—that sounds awesome. Just out of curiosity—

Inder: One thing on that—the thing I think that's also really fun is a lot of the IP that's being registered right now is songs, just really great pieces of music from very reputable, Grammy-winning musicians, for example. And they're saying, "Remix me." Come and take these stems and make your own versions. Go release them—put them on Spotify or monetize them. But you just have to pay me as well—give me a kickback, give me a royalty rate.

I think it's really fun. It unlocks this new, but very simple, step evolution from how an artist might think about their relationship with creators and fans to now being like, "Let's build things together."

Come in and remix me. You don't need to be a musician, but there's tools for you to play with my music in fun new ways and extend its existence. Because I made it, and it's one version, but it could also be really beautiful as a lo-fi minimal version that works for you.

I think there's something really fun in that. As someone who makes music, we obsess over the details and you want to get a song to be absolutely perfect. And I think what's really fun about this future—and we're seeing it with TikTok and all these things—is fans are coming in without the artist's approval, speeding up and slowing down a song, or doing whatever they want to it. They just do whatever they want, and it's great because it actually sometimes brings new life into a piece of music.

So for us, it's this small evolution to say: that's great, and you can do that. But there's also now a business model that can help ensure the artist gets paid and has some way to participate in that future. So it's remix culture evolved—is really the way I like to think about a lot of these things. It's just a new way to think about remix culture.

And one thing I haven't talked about, which I do think is important: when you register your IP—like your songs or your script—and you allow people to remix, that's great. That's one use case. Another really important use case is saying, "I don't want this to be trained on AI," or "I'm happy for it to be trained on AI, but I want to be monetized. I want attribution so I understand where my music has been used."

I think those are really important problems because as much as Suno and the Udio’s of this world are great to democratize music creation, they have built multi-billion-dollar empires off the back of other people's IP without any agreements in place. So for us, it's about building towards a future that gives artists, first of all, control to decide where and when their music and IP is being used, and give them the tools so they can have transparency and actually be able to participate in that future—rather than having to sit on the sidelines and just accept it.

So to me, there are two parts of this that are really important: protect and grow. And those are the two pieces of this tech that I think it's there to serve in principle.

Michael: Wow. Yeah, I mean that's certainly like a huge problem to solve with the AI models at large—is like, how do you attribute the training data source? We've very curious in terms of like how that works. I know that there's a lot of things—even like the AI people who are developing it—it's just hard for them to keep up, and there's a whole line of work, I forget what the name of it is, but it's like interpretability.

They're trying to figure out how, and I imagine as it gets more and more intelligent, that'll probably be getting even harder and harder to sort of understand unless we use AI to help break it down and understand it.

Inder: I mean, on that piece, I think there's two points. One is, first of all, all AI companies have to be auditable. So your dataset has to be clearly auditable, and that has to be proven. And so at least there's a licensing model. I can ensure my music is there.

And then I think there's a bunch of other solutions in place. There are companies like Surreal AI doing some amazing stuff to track attribution. And also there's prompting—you can design the products in a way where you can say, "Alright, I want to use Deadmau5 as a prompt." And great, there's a business model to try and attribute.

So I think there's a few steps in this journey that are required, but we're still in the early stages of it. It's the infancy. It's more exploratory right now until we get to an industry standard. But it's important that people are talking about it and working towards it as a whole.

Michael: Wow. Super interesting. I just got this visual of a brain, or it's like a neural network, and there's a neuron in there that's like "Deadmau5." And then when you @ mention Deadmau5, it lights up that area of the brain where it's like, "Oh, here's all the Deadmau5-related things." And then when you create it, it's like you could directly attribute that with a direct mention. Wow.

Okay, so what would you say right now is maybe some of the biggest misconceptions in the music industry that you think maybe people aren't fully grasping or aware of yet, that in the future it's gonna be like common sense—like, oh my gosh, how did we not recognize that?

Inder: Hmm, that's a good question. Misconceptions in the music industry. I mean, there's a few things that are very relevant to the work I do. One is: blockchain and Web3 has had a negative connotation to it, which is really strange.

Because it's just technology, right? It's like saying, "I don't like databases." Like, what do you mean? Who says that? No one's like, "I don't like SQL," because it's a scam. No one thinks like that.

But blockchain has a very negative connotation because there are scams in the blockchain culture. And there have been—it's unregulated and there are a lot of challenges. And also, at the same time, it's a technology that can change the nature of power structures in the industry. So understandably, there's mixed feelings and emotions around the tech.

I would say blockchain definitely has a misconception—people think it's a scam, and it's just the technology. How it's applied is more important to obsess over, rather than trying to think about it as this overarching culture, which it does have elements of.

But I would say that's one piece. "Blockchain is a scam," "Crypto is a scam"—there's merit to those statements. I'm not going to act like there's not. For sure, there's a lot of work to do in the sector. And I think that's probably largely driven by the fact that it's fans who think this. It's users—the people that we want to onboard—who believe this, even though, if you ask them, "Would you support a technology that helps your favorite artist get paid more fairly and transparently?" they'd say yes.

But then blockchain comes with its own connotations, which is strange. And again, like I said, there's many reasons for that. On the one hand, artists in the early stages a few years ago coming out, doing sales, making millions of dollars in some cases for songs—and it's like, okay, there's nothing wrong with that in the grand scheme of things, but it's not accessible for everyone. And fine, I get it.

But I would say that's one major misconception.

Another misconception—I'm not sure if it's a misconception, but it's just something that I think is really important—is that streaming is not the be-all and end-all. A lot of artists are largely optimizing for streams and plays. That is the distribution, which makes sense.

And again, it's known in some senses, but the fact that you can actually make a really sustainable career from managing a really strong community of fans and super-serving the thousands rather than trying to just reach the millions—I do think it's known, but again, it's important. When I speak to a lot of musicians, I try to help them understand that you really need to have a solid idea about how you think about your community. You don't need to chase the numbers all the time because that fanbase is ultimately so essential.

What other misconceptions are there? There's probably dozens. I think your catalog—your intellectual property—is everything. Again, it's maybe not a misconception, just a really important point of knowledge. If you are a musician, you want to make sure you own your rights because that is the thing that 10 years, 20 years, 50 years from now could be the thing that helps you retire and gives you an exit—the same way a startup has an exit.

So making sure that you have good legal advice and understand your copyright and copyright laws and your intellectual property—I would say it's a hugely important topic that is maybe under... not undermined, but people don't think about it as much as they should. It really is such an important part of the future that we need to build for artists—helping them understand that your intellectual property is everything. Your fans and your IP are going to be the things that will allow you to sustain a career as a musician.

The more tools and education there is for artists around these things—I think that's hugely important, really game-changing. There's dozens more—I could probably go on for days—but those are the ones that get me passionate and excited. The ones that, when I look at my founders and business partners, it's the foundations that they've set. It is the future that they believe in. That is the reason why I think like this—because that's what they're trying to create for their artists and the music industry as a whole.

So that's inspired me massively as an important topic of education, I think, overall.

Michael: Hmm. Oh man, super powerful. I’m so grateful that they gave the opportunity to have conversations like this with people like you, to be able to share this with the wider community. I think this is really important for people to understand.

So maybe we could zoom out a bit and cast a vision for the Pixelynx platform, and just understand the core journey that an artist goes through when they join the platform. What are some of the big milestones and parts of that journey that they take when they enter your ecosystem?

Inder: Yeah, so the first step is that you will go to the core protocol and you will hit the registry, which is going live in a few weeks. Right now we're doing it more on an alpha level. So it's selected artists that we're kind of working with, making sure that it all works. So you'll hit the registry, and that's where you'll register your intellectual property.

You'll register your song, your visuals, your artworks—everything that makes up your DNA as a musician and your body of work. So you register that into the IP library and you will also then set your rules for usage. So you can determine whether your songs can be integrated into games, whether they can be remixed, whether they can be used in an AI model, and you can set your license terms for all of these.

So that's for the first step—register your IP so that you can protect it, and we can do a bunch of things once it's registered: fraud detection, all those kinds of things, seeing if people are using it in illegal ways. But that's the first step: register IP.

Once it's registered, you then have options to distribute to new platforms. So you can distribute a song to Chorus, where you can enable people to remix your music, and you can share royalties with them. You can monetize. We've seen artists who will make more money in 24 hours than they would in a year on Spotify using platforms like Chorus, where they only need to sell 500 to 1,000 units, and they'll still make 100x over what they'd make in a year on Spotify.

And it's amazing whether you are a Grammy-winning musician or an emerging artist. So those are the two steps: register and then distribute. And distribute means putting it out not into DSPs, not into Spotify—because you have your tools for that—but into the new places that you weren't able to access: into games, into remix products, into these new formats of consumption that we're really excited about.

So I would say that's the high level of it all. And then, as you start to see people engage, you can then track usage and track royalties and get paid, and basically start to optimize your career and manage your intellectual property through these new outcomes and use cases.

Michael: Mm. Cool. So am I understanding it right that we're sort of in this alpha phase right now? So at the time of recording this, there's actually a unique opportunity to be one of the first people to get access to this platform?

Inder: Completely. And some of our tools are already live. So Chorus, which is K-O-R-U-S, you'll be able to find that and you can try that product out. But the registry is publicly going live in a few weeks. But yeah, if it's not live, you can reach out. You can find me—I'm sure our socials will be—you can find my name. It's pretty easy to find me. And we're more than happy to give people early access and offer that, of course, to the community here as well. I'd love to explore how we can do that too.

Michael: Mm. Awesome. Well hey man, it's been great connecting here on the podcast and talking a little bit about your vision that you cast almost a decade ago. I bet it feels pretty amazing to start to see it come into life and some of the fruition of those ideas turning into this platform you're building.

So thank you for taking the time to come on the podcast and share a little bit about what you're building. And best place for people to go if they're interested in connecting more, you said, is going to be to the website directly—which I'm happy to include all the links in the show notes underneath here, as well as your social accounts. Any last piece of advice for anyone that's listening to us right now?

Inder: I think it really depends on where you are in your career journey. I'm very excited about AI. I think it's this potentially scary topic, but I think a lot of musicians are very open to using it—not necessarily to make music, like you don't need to use AI to make music. Sampling? Fine, could be cool.

But I do think it's really important to study what's happening with the AI renaissance, because this is a creative renaissance that's taking place, and it will empower you as an artist to do things that you were never able to do. It will allow you to create at a really proficient level through video and through other things, but also through things like AI agents—which I would suggest you research—and other tools.

You can optimize your career in a way that a whole team would be doing, and you can do this with technology now. So that would be my main bit of advice: study what's happening with AI. Study AI agents. Experiment with the tools.

And also look into blockchain and intellectual property as another layer of this. AI and blockchain are renaissance technologies that can completely transform the creative world we live in and give you more control and also more creative expression and so much more. So yeah, I'm really excited overall. I think there's so much to look forward to.

And my main thing is just—study the tools and experiment with them. Find a way for them to fit into your workflow. Whether that's optimizing your social media, or helping you come up with ideas, or suddenly creating a music video—the world's your oyster in every sense now.

So embrace the renaissance. That's what I would say, because it is really here.

Michael: Mm-hmm. I like it. Embrace the renaissance. I feel like that should go on a t-shirt somewhere. Inder, man, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you again for taking the time to be on the podcast today.

Inder: That was really great, Michael. I really appreciate your time. And everyone listening in—thank you for giving us 35 minutes or so, however long it was, of your time. Hope it was useful.