#643 Monetizing Music On-Chain with Justin Blau

Justin Blau, who is best known as 3LAU, is a DJ and electronic dance music producer. He has also been an early advocate for Bitcoin and digital art as well. Today is he revealing a new company, Royal, which he has cofounded. In this conversation, we discuss NFTs, 3LAU’s success in the industry, how music economics are coming on-chain, what Royal does, and how he anticipates this evolving over time. ======================= Polymarket is the world’s leading information markets platform where you can trade on the most pressing global questions and see unbiased, real-time data on what the market thinks will happen – all on the blockchain. For a limited time, sign up with referral code “Pomp” to get your first trade reimbursed up to $100. Click on the link to get started: polymarket.co/pomppod ======================= Cosmos is building the Internet of Blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and much more. Dive into Cosmos at cosmos.network/pomp ======================= Matrixport, Asia’s fastest growing digital asset platform with $10 billion in assets under management and custody, it offers one-stop crypto financial solutions including fixed income, DeFi in 1-click, structured products, Cactus Custody™, spot OTC as well as lending. You can earn from high single digit with fixed income to high double digit yield with their Dual Currency Product. If you hold crypto and look for yield, this is the app you don’t wanna miss out. Go download the Matrixport App and enjoy a welcome offer of 30% APY on USDC here: https://invest.matrixport.com/en

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Justin Blau, who is best known as Blau, is a DJ and electronic dance music producer. He has been an early advocate for Bitcoin and digital art as well. Today, he is revealing a new company, Royal, which he has also co-founded. In this conversation, we discuss NFTs, Blau's success in the industry, how music economics are coming on chain, what Royal does, and how he anticipates this evolving over time. I really enjoyed this conversation with Justin, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  sponsors. First up is Polymarket, the world's leading information markets platform, where you can trade on the most pressing global questions, all in this blockchain. Choose from a variety of markets. Will Cardano support smart contracts by October? Will the US have more than 100,000 COVID cases before 2022? Will Trump run again for president? With over $100 million traded in its first year, Polymarket is the go-to platform to settle the biggest debates of the day. Think you know more than the market? Trade on your beliefs and earn a return if you're right. Do you want tomorrow's news today? Check out Polymarket to see real-time data on what the market thinks will happen. No fake news, no pundits without skin in the game. So head over to polymarket.com and make an account today. And for a limited

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  time, if you sign up with the referral code Pomp to get your first trade reimbursed, up to $100. Again, for a limited time, if you go to polymarket.com and you use referral code Pomp, any trade you make, the very first one, up to 100 bucks, they will give you a reimbursement. Polymarket.com, use code Pomp, and they'll get reimbursed up to 100 bucks on your first trade. No-brainer. Go check it out. Let me know what you think. Next up is Cosmos. Cosmos is building the Internet of Blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Much more dive into Cosmos at cosmos dot network slash pop again cosmos dot network slash pop. Go check it out. The Internet of Blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. Cosmos dot network slash pop. Last but not least is Matrix Port. Have you lost your way in this low yield environment while searching for a better store of value to beat inflation? Look no further. You can invest with Matrix Port to get more out of your assets. Matrix Port is Asia's fastest growing digital asset platform founded by crypto veterans with over $10 million in assets under management and custody. Matrix Port offers one-stop crypto financial solutions, including fixed income, DeFi in one click, structured

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  products, Cactus custody, spot OTC, and lending. You can earn from high single-digit with fixed income to high double-digit yield with dual currency products. If you hold assets and look for a yield, this app you don't want to miss. Go download the Matrix Port app by clicking on the link in the description and enjoy a welcome offer of high yield for new users. Again, go to the link in the description, click there, and you can download the app today, or you can go to the website at invest dot matrixport.com. Again, invest dot matrixport.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Justin. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:53Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Justin here with me. Thanks so much for doing this, man.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Dude, pleasure to be here as always.

• 4:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Everyone knows you as Blau, so I'm gonna call you Justin. But for those that don't know, you've got two names similar, similar to me.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, everyone probably calls you Pomp more than, more than Anthony, right? Like, on average, it's probably Pomp.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Of course, that's the only way that it could be. Let's talk about your journey in Bitcoin, Ethereum, the crypto world. I feel like you knew nothing and then you became a star like overnight. So walk us through, for those who didn't listen to our first podcast episode, like how did all this happen?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  I think that's the potential for everyone listening to, by the way. If you dive in and you dive hard enough, you'll figure it out pretty quickly. But I started in 2014, you know, just knowing a little bit about Bitcoin. The Winklevoss twins actually were the ones to introduce me to BTC at the time. And I was just fascinated by frictionless value transfer anywhere in the world, 24/7, without a central counterparty or bank. That was fascinating to me as someone who studied finance. And as Ethereum started to grow and that ecosystem started to grow, the potential of decentralized applications and how that might affect the entertainment business was super fascinating to me. So from 2014 to 2017, I was more of just like a passive Bitcoin holder. And then in 2017, I just dove headfirst into the Ethereum ecosystem

• 5:24Speaker 02

  and really started learning about all the ways, you know, different protocols might affect the entertainment world. Fast forward to, in 2018, I was actually experimenting with NFTs and like digital collectibles on, you know, combo of Ethereum and Stellar Lumens, just experimenting with how that might apply to live music. And it was a little bit too early at the time in 2018, but I always kind of was fascinated by it. So in 2020, when NFTs reemerged and started manifesting as art, I was really focused on, well, how might this type, you know, how might non-fungible tokens apply to music? And that's when I started making audiovisual art. And between, I guess it would have been August of last year, August of 2020 and August of this year,

• 6:08Speaker 02

  we did, myself and my art director combined have done over 20 million in sales of NFTs and are just extremely excited about the future of how we can utilize these assets and create more meaning in ownership of them.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  How crazy is it for you to think about selling $20 million worth of these NFTs?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  If somebody told me that a year ago, I definitely wouldn't have believed them. And it's just fascinating how, you know, the crypto community gets behind and supports new innovative ideas and wants to push boundaries. Just the community itself is so powerful and they put money where their mouths are. And I think that's really, that's really incredible.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  So obviously, all of that experience led you to think more about this, test more things. You're now starting a business. Talk to me a little bit about what business you're starting, who you're starting it with, and kind of what's the idea?

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So I had done all these sales, particularly for music NFTs. And at the time, they were really just collectible audio files that had authenticated signatures, right? An NFT is basically just a digital certificate of authenticity that says, "You own one of addition number three of 100 of this song." Let's call it, right? And that's interesting. But I wanted to take it a step further. You know, number one, how do you give ownership? How do you give ownership of these assets more meaning than just certification? Part one. And part two, how do you actually create meaning surrounding that ownership, where a fan or a collector owns a piece of the song itself? And that was always a question that I asked myself, even when I started issuing NFTs. Like, that was the future.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  But of course, doing that requires a team, a lot of complicated experience. You know, a lot of complicated problems that needed to be fixed by a team of experienced people. And certainly not something that I could figure out on my own. So I was lucky enough to call one of my best friends from college, my friend JD Ross, who started another company that's currently publicly traded called Open Door. And I said, "JD, I want my fans to own a piece of my music via, you know, NFT ecosystems, crypto ecosystems. Would you want to build that company with me?" And a week later, he was like, "Yep, I'm on board. That sounds frickin' awesome." Right? Like, letting fans invest in music is such a powerful concept, because fans themselves are the reason why music is distributed and successful, right? You can market music as much as you want.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  But in today's day, the algorithm and how much fans consume a song actually influences how successful that song becomes. So why not let those fans and other listeners participate in the upside of a song? And that was kind of what the concept that created Royal, which is the new company that we're starting, JD and myself. We just kind of, we've been building in stealth for about three months, but we just, you know, filled a $16 million seed round from Paradigm, Founders Fund, Atomic, and yourself, lucky to have you involved. And we're just really excited to launch. And we haven't told anybody about it until now. And it's just exciting, because we've been working on it for three, four months, really, really hardcore. We have 10 employees now and just grinding away.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Explain how this is gonna work, at least kind of in the initial version, right? So this whole idea of like musicians getting their fans to invest in their music? Do they get economic upside in it? What is kind of the technical underpinnings? Whatever you can share kind of at the initial stages right now, how does it work?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, and your listeners will be familiar with a lot of these concepts. So it's really great to kind of give some specifics. Imagine you have 100 editions of a song, 100 official editions, and each of those editions represents about 50 basis points in the master recording ownership of the song, right? So a fan or an artist can can split ownership of a song with multiple fans. That's not quite fractionalizing the song. It's actually just that, you know, treating each fan as a collaborator in the song theoretically is how how it's kind of structured, where there's an actual legal agreement on-chain that says this NFT is entitled to, you know, 50 basis points of all revenue associated with the master recording of this song, right? Now, we have to build out smart contract architecture to achieve that and actually distribute

• 10:07Speaker 02

  the cash flows from the off-chain world to the on-chain world. And this can only be done today compliantly with finished music, which is a whole other part of the conversation that we can have. You can't like raise money for the next album via this architecture. That becomes a little bit more complicated. But but that's the that's the basic principle where if there's a song that exists, you can own a collectible edition of it and participate in the upside should that song become more successful. And, oh, sorry, I was gonna say, worth mentioning, you know, as a strong, as a song streams more and more, Spotify and Apple Music and all these different, you know, streaming providers do pay out quite substantially. There's kind of this misperception in the public narrative that streaming services don't pay artists.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  It's actually that like middlemen take a large percentage of that of that income. But if an artist does own a larger percentage of their rights, it has become 50x more profitable in 2021 as compared to 2016, and I can personally attest to that.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  So one of the things that's so fascinating to me about this is you have a trend in music and entertainment in general of artists owning equity, getting higher percentages, potentially even being independent and trying to get out of their contracts. We've also seen artists who have basically taken their library and sold those off, right, for kind of upfront cash. And it just feels like there's much more sophistication and professionalism and kind of access to capital markets for artists. What you're really trying to do here is take it a step further and say, hey, there's this new technology that we could leverage. And rather than go to Wall Street or other wealthy individuals, let's just go straight to the fans and let's align.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Democratize it. Exactly, 100%. Right now, all the activity that's happening in music and catalog sales and, you know, all these things that are happening off-chain, they're all, you know, mostly private equity hedge funds, Wall Street, that are investing in these, in streams, in streaming revenue because it's supposedly inflation-protected revenue. There's a lot of like really great statistics about how streaming economy is growing just out so substantially, even beyond music. Like this applies to YouTubers and gamers and all types of things, right? But just, you know, unlike, unlike equities, you know, it's pretty difficult for the regular person to invest in their favorite music. Like there's no like real gateway for them to do that.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  And so by democratizing that access, we believe that we'll align fans incentives with artists and push fans to actually promote that music even more, should they actually be stakeholders in it, right? And we've seen this apply, you know, and I hate to say it, but like things like Dogecoin, where, you know, you just have a community surrounding a meme that might not do anything at all. But community ownership is just a really powerful thing. And why not give real ownership to the people that are actually listening? And to me, that was, that was something that was so obvious. And it's funny, I tweeted about it a couple of times over the past couple of months. And all the tweets that talked about, you know, giving NFT holders real ownership in the rights of the music.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  And I said that a couple of times on Twitter. Those have been my most viral tweets I've ever tweeted in my entire Twitter career. So there's clear demand from it from the marketplace. There's a lot of people that want to own music as an asset class, the same way you can own, you know, sneakers as an asset class or baseball cards as an, you know, graded baseball cards or Pokemon cards, right? We just haven't had access, the community, the broader community, hasn't been able to invest in music. It's not that the demand isn't there, it's that there's no mechanism for it.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  So let's say that I come in and I buy one of these hundred songs and that gives me 50 basis points of the revenue that comes from the song, right? Am I then able to enjoy the cash flow from that asset ownership? And then at some point in the future, I can actually turn it into a different fan and it's just a traditional tradable asset?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Exactly, like, and the specifics of payouts are something that we're still like very focused on. So I don't want to commit to like a specific structure of when payouts happen and it all depends on the artist and what their separate structures are, right? But theoretically, yes, you know, you can buy this asset. At the end of every month, there's revenues collected from all the different streaming services. You technically own a percentage of that by contract, by legal contract, right? And you receive a, you know, a cash flow from all those other streaming services. And if you decide that you want to sell that asset in a month or two months, you would collect on that and then, you know, sell it at whatever the market price is. And, you know, of course, depending on how successful that artist is or that song is, or as we've seen with CryptoPunks and Board Apes and all these other NFTs that don't have

• 14:38Speaker 02

  cash flows, there's other emotional value associated with owning an exclusive digital asset. And in our case, we're not even calling these things NFTs. We're actually calling them LDAs or limited digital assets because the architecture surrounding the smart contracts is quite a bit more complex than just like a minting contract and a token ID. There's a lot of other things happening. We want some of these assets to include consumables. So let's say you buy one of 100 official editions of a song that might entitle you to listening to, you know, unreleased music from that artist, or it might entitle you to one all access pass a year while you hold that asset, right? There might be vesting function. There's all these things that we can add and features that we can add to these assets. But in reality, it starts out with a simple cash flow because it's something that people understand. Then there's an infinite number of things we can build on top of that.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Whenever there's disruption in a market, there's both positive and negative ramifications of that. What do you see as the positives here? And then what are the, who are the people who get disrupted? Or what are like the negative ramifications of successful?

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the positive is that artists have been preyed upon in the music business for decades, myself included. Kanye West famously sold 86% of all the equity in his music for $2.5 million, which of course today is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And we ideally think that a tool like this might level the playing field and give artists an alternative capital source, an alternative distribution source than a traditional predatory deal. Who gets disrupted? I think the entire legacy music world will probably suffer a bit if this works, and I think that's a good thing. I think that record labels are still valuable. They provide a lot of services, from A&R services to promotional services, but the deal structure is just predatory. And so, a tool like this existing will force labels and these existing ecosystems to become

• 16:21Speaker 02

  more competitive and offer more services. Royal is not a distribution service at all. We don't do anything beyond connecting a fan with their artist and making these types of investments possible. But we aren't going to go and tell you that we're going to help you find a singer for your next song, which is something that a record label traditionally does. What could get really interesting, though, is you now start to see these economies of scale where all these fans are interested in being a part of this artist's journey, and then maybe there's a connection that's formed between fan and artist. Maybe one of those fans ends up singing on the next song and earns an even larger piece of the pie for that next record. And so, you see a lot of really interesting things happen when you align incentives between

• 17:04Speaker 02

  the two parties that are responsible for the success of one party, in this case, the artist. Fans just haven't had the ability to gain upside in what they consume in entertainment. So, this is just the beginning of that.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  How much of this technology could be used, not only for fans to invest in the music, but also just operationally keeping track of who's owed what on the song? So whether it's the producer, a singer, etc., could you also leverage it to do some of the legacy management and just now automate it with this tech?

• 17:37Speaker 02

  That's a really good question and one that we get a lot. So you know, the actual like bookkeeping and account tracking happens kind of before our product exists. So like, there are a lot of really great distribution services that even I'm plugged into like STEM or United Masters that are doing that kind of royalty tracking now. We're more tracking it specifically in fan ownership as opposed to between artists and between collaborators. That's definitely a different segment of the market. That being said, as kind of payments start happening on chain more frequently, and as like live streaming data becomes more transparent, we definitely will have the infrastructure to support, you know, on-chain payment systems. And we're like building that out for ourselves. But you know, should an artist want to use us for that in the future,

• 18:20Speaker 02

  it's definitely something we're thinking about. But in the short term, we're more focused on the actual smart contract architecture that bridges this, you know, off-chain cash flows on chain, and you know, how these assets trade in a marketplace on chain, how they are withdrawable from our kind of existing ecosystem, and you know, how we make these assets permissionlessly tradable across things, you know, open marketplaces like OpenSea. And we're kind of thinking about all that stuff first. But, but yes, I mean, royalty payments and distribution in the legacy world is an absolute mess. And so, you know, any new artist that's going to be issuing assets in our platform, we're going to encourage them to, you know, use some of these new services that do a way better job tracking than the legacy services that that pay out like once

• 19:03Speaker 02

  every six months and you have to like beg them, you know, which, which does happen. So.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  We've talked a lot about music. I'm assuming that this technology is also applicable to things like movies, et cetera. Is that true?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Everything. Exactly. And that's the next question everyone asks is, well, once you create this kind of framework for, you know, investing in entertainment, not just music, doesn't it apply to everything? And the answer is yes. The reason why we're starting with music is, you know, number one, it's my domain of expertise. And so, starting there makes the most sense. But number two, it's also probably the most difficult to conquer, which is why we're, we're starting with it. Because if we can conquer music, a lot of the intricacies will apply to a lot of other industries and entertainment. So instead of kind of going after something easy, we go after something Thing that, you know, in my opinion, musicians are also maybe the most disenfranchised of all creatives comparatively. In the sense that like YouTubers typically do get to, you know, YouTube obviously takes a cut, but YouTubers do get paid, you know,

• 20:00Speaker 02

  from their content pretty well. Musicians in particular have, you know, historically just signed these terrible deals that they forcibly give away like 90% or 86% or whatever it is.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  You've obviously talked to a ton of artists, both informally, and then once you've decided to start the business, what's been the reaction from those artists?

• 20:19Speaker 02

  It's been, it's been incredible to the point where we're, we're so excited to launch and so excited to let, let this out to the world. We have some pretty high profile musician investors that we'll be announcing later in the future. Real, I should say really high profile musician investors who just believe in the product and believe that this is the future of music. And it's, it's really encouraging because it's an idea that took, you know, I would say it's an idea that I've been thinking about for four years, but I've only been executing on for four months, right? It's, it's something that I've always thought about, but when it comes down to actually pulling the trigger, it's a difficult one. There's so many variables and so many people we need to hire from legal experts to programming experts to solidity developers, you know, there's an infinite number of things to do, but

• 21:01Speaker 02

  the timing is now, right? The public has never been more aware of what's happening in the crypto ecosystem than now, both with fungible currencies and non-fungible tokens. And so, you know, now that you've got people like Jay-Z, you know, changing his profile picture to a CryptoPunk, this is the time to start experimenting. Hundred percent.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Talk about the fundraise, why this specific firm Z chose to partner with, and what are you going to do with the money?

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Great, great question. So I would say all of the money is going to go towards hiring the best people. You know, building a team of experts surrounding this idea is very hard and we are hiring quickly and excitedly. We, we brought on some amazing team members and that I think will really help us execute our vision, because it really does take a team to disrupt an entire industry. In terms of partners, I actually, my co-founder JD started Open Door with Keith and Keith Raboy was the lead. At Founders Fund, which is one of our lead investors and the other investor is Fred Arzim with Paradigm. And Keith actually introduced me to Fred four years ago when I started exploring, you know, how ETH might, how the ETH ecosystem might disrupt music.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  And so all of the people, all of our investors are friends of both JD and myself and have been for years. And so when we kind of finally decided to go forward with the idea, naturally, we told them first. And because, you know, Keith introduced me to Fred, everyone was friends. We wanted to, you know, split the round evenly and, you know, you know, get this company well capitalized. So we could build an incredible product as soon as possible.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Talk about building with a friend that you've known for a long time and you both kind of coming together. Obviously, he had a bunch of success with Open Door. You've had a bunch of success in the NFT space and then kind of coming together here to build this. Like, what's that like working with him on a daily basis?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  I'm honestly so thankful that he said yes, because I know that I could not have done it on my own. It's like a marriage. It's like a proposal, right? Like, I got down on one knee and I was like, JD, I kind of need you to build this crazy idea because I can't do it on my own. And the second he said yes, we were off to the races. But it's been incredible. Obviously, we've been, we've been friends for 11 years. I actually played, one of my first DJ performances ever was his fraternity basement at Washington University in St. Louis.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  At Sign New, it was a heaven and hell party and I got paid in a bottle of Crown Royal whiskey, which is partially where the name comes from. Yeah, so that's a fun, fun fact about Royal. Of course, we're all short for royalty as well. But I, that's kind of the backstory with JD and I, but we've just kept in touch over the years. He's always had an interest in crypto, obviously is familiar with what it takes to disrupt an existing industry, real estate, you know, with crazy legacy legal infrastructure, lots of inefficiencies. And Open Door took that head on and really did, and ended up succeeding, you know, over the years. And so who would be a better partner as someone who's built multiple companies before

• 24:01Speaker 02

  to help me execute this vision than a best friend from college? So I'm really honored that he said yes to working with me and it's been, it's been the best experience for sure.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  That's awesome. Let's zoom out 20 years from now. What is like the ultimate vision of Royal, right? We talked a little bit about kind of what are you initially trying to accomplish? What's the idea today? What do you think this can grow into or what's the dream of what it could be?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, we want to create a world where anyone can buy ownership of music directly from the artists that make that music. And when you own it, you're more incentivized to distribute it and be a tastemaker. And it's something that people are already doing today, right? People love being first to new music. They always like to brag, but when they saw that favorite artist of theirs five years ago before they were popular. So we're just kind of leaning into that world. So looking at the future, we want there to be markets for music ownership, something that exists only privately today. And if you look at all other types of markets, they always start very private OTC style and become more available to the masses over time. Same with cryptocurrencies, right? Like, you know, some of the first crypto exchanges, it was very

• 25:09Speaker 02

  difficult to buy cryptocurrencies with fiat for a very, very long time. Now, it's extremely easy thanks to companies like Coinbase. And, and, you know, I, I think that that's the world that we want to see. We want to see music being freely traded. And we want to see artists who can develop their careers without the dependencies of rather inefficient legacy ecosystems and creating a more direct to fan relationship. The other piece of this that I haven't mentioned yet is all the tickets that I've ever sold and all the streams that I've ever generated,

• 25:43Speaker 02

  I don't know who any of those people are. I've, I've generated over a billion streams across my career, and I have no idea who any of those people are. None of that data is shared with me. At least, you know, with Royal, these artists will be able to know who their fans are and engage with them and create a community of a thousand powerful fans, you know, the thousand true fan theory, actually do that and execute on that and engage that community. And so, yeah, we, we hope to see a lot of that happening in the future with our product. And it's really just the beginning. And we think it's going to take some time. Like, without a doubt, this is not something that's going to happen overnight. But we're ready for

• 26:18Speaker 03

  The part of, to me, that's so fascinating about this is not only can you align economic incentives, right, which then feeds this like user behavior, I'm gonna listen to this song, I'm gonna tell all my friends about it because I have an economic stake in it, but also this idea that it gives you a relationship with the fan that's very, very unique, right? It feels to me like, as we've moved to a digital world, artists are still trying to find, how do I provide that special experience? How do I provide that kind of deeper relationship? And maybe I can't fly to every city and meet everybody, but what can I do in the digital world? And, you know, to be honest, like, what's better than making someone money, right? It's kind of like the ultimate relationship that you could have with a fan.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. If someone stood by you in the beginning, they should be able to earn from being a part of your experience. And one of the things that we're doing is, we're not always, Royal's gonna be involved in a lot of really cool campaigns where fans don't even necessarily have to buy these assets, they can actually earn them.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  All right, I got two more questions, then we're done with the recording. How can people at home who are listening to this participate, help, etc.? Are you guys are hiring, or is there somewhere you want to send them? What can they do right now if they're super excited about this idea, want to kind of stay with what you're doing?

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have a bunch, with the funding announcement, we wanted to make sure that we had a website ready to intake all the inbound interest. And so if you go to royal.io, there are lots of forums. If you're an artist, you can apply to be a part of it and create a project with us. If you're a fan, you can sign up and you can also refer other fans and friends who might want to be involved. And we actually have a ranking system for those referrals that will launch on Thursday. So definitely refer your friends, create an account, and that will do some fun things in the future.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  My last question is more personal for you. I've known you for a little while now, and I think most people see you as Blau, the musician. You then became kind of this tech-forward musician. If somebody was to ask you today what you do for a living, do you consider yourself a technology entrepreneur? A musician? Do you have like a 72-word bio that you said?

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Like, how do you think of yourself now? Because you're pioneering this really interesting thing where you're like part investor, part musician, part tech entrepreneur. So how do you think about it?

• 28:35Speaker 02

  I guess for the next many years, I'm the CEO of Royal, which is kinda crazy. I mean, I'm still gonna make music, I'm still gonna play shows, but I'm definitely, you know, dialing that back. I used to do, you know, upwards of 100 shows per year. I'm probably dialing that back to like 30, and really focusing full on, on this idea. I'm all in. I really believe this is the future of music, and I gotta give it a shot. So, that's the plan. I guess, I guess for the next little while, I'm CEO of Royal and Blau, as opposed to Blau and CEO of Royal. That's, that's the plan.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  That is a, that's a great response, and frankly, I think more and more musicians and entertainers are gonna follow your footsteps. So, good for you. Alright, where can we send people to, to follow you on the internet? Twitter, where you wanna send them?

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for Blau, it's just three L-A-U everywhere. I put a three in my name. Some people say three Lau. It is pronounced Blau, but you know, you can say whatever you want. For Royal, it's royal.io, and then it's join underscore Royal on most social platforms. And that will all be launching very soon. We're, we're so hyped.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  I, I'm excited to be along for the ride. I think you're on to something here, my friend. So, thanks so much for, for coming on, talking about it. Highly suggest everyone go check it out, and we'll do this again.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Sure. Appreciate you, man. Thanks for listening.