Remix the Remix: How MRKD.dj Is Rewiring Music Ownership and IP for Web3 enabled World

What if DJs could remix, monetize, and own music like never before? In this mind-expanding episode, I sit down with Jaime Schwarz — brand strategist, NFT patent holder, and founder of MRKD.dj — to explore how blockchain is redefining music ownership, IP, and co-creation. From remix rights to fan distribution and Keith Shocklee’s role in launching a new creative economy, this episode hits every note.

We dive deep into:
- Why Web3 needs better ownership models
- How MRKD.dj turns DJs into prosumers and remixers
- The story behind the first-ever NFT patent
- Rethinking the future of digital music, NFTs, and identity

Jaime believes blockchain is the missing layer for the IP economy — offering permanence, provenance, and programmable rights at scale. In a world where AI is eating the service economy, he sees IP as the next frontier of value — and music, with its deep-rooted remix culture and licensing complexity, as the ideal first use case. MRKD.dj isn’t just about tracks — it’s about unlocking a future where artists, DJs, and fans co-create, co-own, and get rewarded in real-time.

Tune in before their live launch at New York Tech Week on June 6!
(link to tickets: https://partiful.com/e/mFEMK9C7GHKoRw73ryVg)

Chapters

00:00 Exploring Bulgaria's History and Culture
01:46 The Intersection of Branding and Blockchain
04:24 The Birth of NFTs and Ownership in the Digital Age
07:04 Revolutionizing Music Ownership and Distribution
09:49 The Role of Centralized Institutions in a Decentralized World
12:28 The Future of IP and Music in the Blockchain Era
14:34 Pivoting from Art to Music: The Mark.DJ Journey
17:17 Unleashing Creativity through Sampling and Remixing
19:54 The Value of Digital Ownership and NFTs
21:57 Navigating the Challenges of Digital Immutability
24:42 The Economic Potential of Tokenized IP
28:25 Exploring the New York Music Scene
28:54 Innovative Music Experiences and Limited Editions
30:19 Remixing the Future of Music
31:24 Ticketing and Exclusive Access
31:53 The Role of Social Networks in Music
31:54 Future Plans for Mark DJ
33:00 Building an IP Economy
36:16 Startup Lessons and Team Dynamics
36:39 Final Thoughts and Community Engagement

MY GUEST LINKS:
Jaime Schwarz LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimeschwarz/
Keith Shocklee Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keithshocklee/
MRKD.dj is the website

Transcript

W3M - Pete (00:00)
Hello everyone. And I'm back. today I'm sitting in Bulgaria I'm talking to Jamie and Jamie already is very interesting person just because he knows something I didn't know about Bulgaria, Bulgarian Kings and history. I've been coming to Bulgaria for the past.

almost 15 years and Obviously there is a lot I don't know about Bulgaria. So welcome Jamie

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (00:24)
Yes, well, thank you very much for having me and Bulgaria is a fascinating place. And thanks to having children, you go searching for media left and right. And we found a podcast called the butterfly king, which was a murder mystery thriller about a potential murder a hundred years ago with the last king of Bulgaria. So there you go. Thank you, children.

W3M - Pete (00:42)
There you go, you see? Not that long ago, definitely. Okay, so let's jump right in. Jamie,

How do you get close to blockchain and the topic we are going to talk about today? Because I know that you are something we could call brand strategist. I think you call yourself that on your website. I've definitely seen some interesting names like Converse, Google, and others on your webpage.

which obviously, always sparks interest. If someone is able to work with the brands, all know definitely means they're doing something right. And, it pleases me even more because I always feel that, blockchain crowd think they are like special They just live in the bubble.

So if there is anybody who sort of understands both worlds and has had some success in both worlds, I am definitely happy to hear what they have to say. And I'm always curious about the projects they want to bring to life.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (01:42)
I will preface this by success in the blockchain space is relative, but yes, ⁓ coming from the ad agency world, was a creative copywriter, creative director for about a dozen years. And I got to work with over a hundred brands across dozens of industries. So that kind of perspective building is very, very helpful. And I also started with a leather bound portfolio before, you know, I had a MySpace account was my first digital pitch. Like, you know, it was early days.

W3M - Pete (01:46)
Absolutely.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (02:08)
And I got to witness the birth of centralized platforms and apps and Web2 in general. Excuse me. So there's an awful lot of being a good academic student, understanding your past, being a good listener and observer and strategist about your present, and being a good innovator as a near futurist. So.

making sure you have all those three perspectives when you see something coming along like blockchain. It's not just about understanding what blockchain is or what people are using it for. It's about your own purpose and specialty and what you think it can be used for in that space. So for me in the brand space, we were looking, this is the ICO craze and Pokemon Go. That's what Web3 was in 2017.

And at that point, I had already moved off of just storytelling and TV spots into hackathons and site builds and systems and those kinds of things for my clients. So thinking about what would happen if people are buying things in Pokemon Go and they can't leave Pokemon Go with them, where's ownership? We're losing ownership. We've already lost it. crap.

W3M - Pete (03:15)
Mm-hmm.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (03:17)
you know, we saw this before with Napster. We saw, as soon as a media becomes digital, no longer, reliant on a physical piece of delivery, whatever that be, a vinyl record or whatever. It's copy and pasteable. It's bootleg-able to a scale. And, that collapsed the industry overnight. And you had Sony suing five-year-old girls because they were downloading music on Napster. What? That's not an industry.

It took digital rights management and iTunes to take a step forward. And we ended up in streaming centralized platforms that own the music. And then you pay a monthly fee to give 0.00001 cents per play to somebody. And I wanted to get back to ownership. Ownership not being possible in a digital space. You needed object permanence. That's what the centralized platforms are for. Okay. So that means we have licensure. That means centralized platforms are

feudalist societies where we just work in service of what they own. It's an analogy. It's not 1600, but it's apt and the mechanics of the invisible hands of the market are the same. So blockchain, what's this thing? We can own products. Okay. NFT has just been born. ⁓ I think this was, I think I filed the same month a patent that

W3M - Pete (04:24)
Mm-hmm.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (04:30)
ERC 721 was introduced with CryptoKitties, at Heath Denver, Benny, smart man, Benny. so I met a patent attorney at at a hackathon and we started talking through all this and I ended up filing what turned out to be the world's first NFT patent. it was really focused on a system and method for identifying virtual goods. That's the title, but it's about using a logo or a trademark or an artist's signature.

or any sort of object of authentication symbol that becomes investigatable. If your object's digital, okay, what can we do with a digital interface with logos? We can empower them. We can make them self-authenticatable. We can give them their own platform. In and of itself, blockchain has the potential to do that, but nobody really solved most of it, which is why we had in 2021, $2 trillion enter

the NFT marketplace and in 2022, $2 trillion leave the NFT marketplace because it wasn't mature enough to handle transactions on a safe level and rug pulling and bootlegging and all the other things that are still prevalent in a Web2 world that just happens to have.

hidden invisible receipts on the backend that nobody's really paying attention to. So once it was filed in 2017, I filed it stealth. I'm not Apple. I'm not Google. I don't have an army of lawyers. You just want to know where the tech's going to go. And it was a dice roll. Didn't know where it was going to happen to it. And it didn't get granted until 2022. So all of that first generation of blockchain advancement went right by.

And I was in the winter, the crypto winter of, of NFTs when it was granted on my older son's birthday, March 8th, 2022. And then I looked around and went, Oh God. Perfect time to build. Uh, thank you. Uh, so I immediately filed continuations and PCTs to catch up with the tech of today, adding in, uh, digital twinning AI, that kind of stuff. But, uh, basically the principle was the same. How do we empower these objects? So Mrkd

W3M - Pete (06:18)
Congratulations.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (06:37)
which was originally called Sign Your NFT, was born. And we focused on art. I grew up with over 20 artists in my family and it was where I wanted to focus. And took a digital signature and turned that into a master NFT that could hold a collection of NFTs. Life didn't get going on earth until we had multicellular life. Single cell life sat there for a billion years. So as we have multicellular life, we have specialization.

working together. So if you let NFTs not just specialize with like, know, ERC 6551 and ERC 1155 and all those others, but actually work together. Now you have a grouped asset NFT that can display itself in multiple formats, hold actual contracts that you can act on, act on smart contracts that you build in and hold provenance, hold its own likes and comments, shares, follows, evolve it.

grow it, add to it, free artists to express themselves across realities and modalities, free owners to showcase and collect those social values that are now the art stone, change the perspective of ownership from the owner to the object, no longer define yourself by the things you own, but by the legacy you leave behind and the objects that live beyond you in NFT story baskets.

more indigenous kind of thinking and something that's still legacy is still more selfish than ownership in my opinion. All that being said Mark Dodd was born in that space and then I reconnected with a good friend from the ad days who was connected with Public Enemies Keith Shocklee the DJ of the bunch. So much the DJ that other DJs follow whatever he does. He's designed for JBL and Pioneer decks.

He's actually, you know, this is a, this is a torch handoff kind of thing. It's not like he's the only one that did this, but you can point to one moment where he had two turntables on a microphone and was the first person to sample. So we turned our attention and pivoted to Mrkd.DJ and said, well, what if instead of grouped asset NFT art, had grouped asset NFT remixed albums, because what's the one industry besides art, which is really focused on provenance, which we cared about that is really, always at the forefront of IP.

Transfer, music. Sampling is a giant lawyer war over and over and over again. And sampling has become such a big deal in music that it's now just another instrument, like anything else. But these instruments have IP. So you end up with pre-clearance, post-clearance, the 12 % of artists in the industry that are signed have lawyers, everybody else just bootlegs. Or they go for, you know,

W3M - Pete (08:58)
you

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (09:10)
some rights managed clear clearance library, and then, you know, make what they can with that. So we want to make sure that, ownership is redefined again in a digital space where it's about control, not about an object. So sure. can get a little vinyl with an NFC chip in it that would lead to the same digital version of this that you would own. Cause we can be across realities. Of course it does. All you have to do is tap your phone to it. And then you just sign in with your DJ name. So my DJ name is.

W3M - Pete (09:29)
This looks cool.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (09:37)
Jamie.DJ. JamieSchwarz.DJ is my wallet. It's my identification. It's how I sign in and interact with music. And it's also my artist name that I can remix and sell with as my own IP. ⁓ So in the remix world, you grab other people's music, you mix it together, you make your own thing. That's ownable. Great. What if all of that stuff is automatic? Everything's not only pre-cleared beforehand.

W3M - Pete (09:49)
Mm-hmm.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (10:04)
but it's instantly commercializable and anything anybody purchases directly from that album, the royalties are automatically going back to the sample owners, automatically. And we're talking all the way down to just people who like to DJ in their basement. Now they are their own label. And it means that anybody who owns something can sell copies with affiliate fees. That's fan distribution.

W3M - Pete (10:24)
So.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (10:26)
So add that on top of the authentication, add that on top of the fact that we have Keith Shocklee as our Ryan Reynolds, the front man, and add to that that we have a name chain. So our blockchain is a taxonomy structure. It's not to build on top of, it's to reference to. So jamieschwarz.dj.keithshockley.songnumber1 is a file name with a JSON that reaches to every CCID I need.

to be a group asset at NFT and fully in control. And I can sell, if I have a first edition, second edition copies. And if I'm one of the only owners, that's the only way to get it. So fan distribution and the affiliate fees that come with it for encouragement become a new way of getting music into people's hands. Not because anybody who can find me physically can have this, but because I can share this online, which is where the patent comes back in.

I can post this as socially as SoundCloud. However, I can purchase it or commercialize it or like it or share it or whatever from the same logo button. It's compatible across the web and they all have their own web address. So that song one that Keith has, that's song1.keithshockley.mark.dj. It has its own web address that's compatible with the file name. So we take the simplicity.

of Web2, of an open web structure, single sign-on. And we get rid of all the things that Web3 still has problems with. There's no Metamask or extension wallet. There's no marketplace that both of those companies have to find their own way to make money off of and exploit out of the system. Fairly, but that's what they have to do. Minting fees, gas fees, media storage fees. We fold all that in.

to one simple 2.5 % transaction fee.

W3M - Pete (12:13)
Mm-hmm.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (12:13)
which is cheaper than

all the other stuff that you would do anyway.

W3M - Pete (12:15)
Yeah, it's so hard to say, you know, how much things cost in Web3. ⁓

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (12:15)
and

Of course it is. Well, if you're, hey, look, if you're to do grouped asset NFTs,

how much minting fee would that be? That's a lot of minting just for one album. It's not one mint. That's like 12. So we just get rid of all of it. It's just simple. Cause what we want is the transactions that happen. We want people to co-create. We're interested in a co-creation economy. We want to turn consumers into prosumers, producer consumers, and we want more tools to be available for people as the IP economy becomes more and more necessary.

W3M - Pete (12:28)
Yep.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (12:46)
We went through, contextually speaking, historically, from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy to a service economy. We didn't get rid of agro. We didn't get rid of industry. We just, where's the push? Where's the innovation? Where are we relying on? Where's the growth? Service is getting taken away now by AI. And AI wants to get rid of IP. And frankly, loop collapse on itself, because once you get rid of the value of IP, nobody's going to make it anymore. Flip side of that, you actually mark IP.

make AI provanceable, markable, commercializable. Hey, I'll pay for the access to this the same way that OpenAI pays the New York Times for the sourcing. I could pay the New York Times for sourcing. Why not have it directly? Right now we're getting those centralized platforms again, owning the IP that we have to pay access to. No more middlemen. Direct connect to the IP.

We've had an IP economy for a long time in terms of patents and trademarks and copyrights, but we need the dollars and cents. We need the things for all the little ideas, all the beats. It's one of our taglines, unleash the beat.

W3M - Pete (13:51)
It's a great thing. I love it. I understood that you got to Mark through art.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (13:53)
Thank you.

W3M - Pete (14:00)
But then you sort of shifted it towards music. I see a lot of art behind you, you posters. So why music? Is it because, you know, it's your passion or you think there is like a more moat to make in music or people are more passionate about music? you know, there are projects which started basically the same.

technical stuff which you do, which is like, you know, Master NFT, which holds the whole worlds of like gaming or avatars or whatever you want. But you started for music. So why music?

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (14:31)
Mm-hmm.

Well, one of the insights that you gain, like I said, I was not doing anything with Web3 in between 2017 when I filed in 2022. What I was doing was co-founding seven startups, really immersing myself in that space, being comfortable with pivoting, understanding that it's the team, not the product that's the important thing. And more uniquely than not, we're an IP founded company, which is a different beast altogether, just like B2B is different or a firm is different.

or product versus digital is different. IP means we are tied to the IP. We can't venture from it. But I didn't file a three pager like CryptoKix did in 2018 or 19. I filed a 40 pager with 12 figures and another 40 pager in the continuation and another 40 pager. Over 100 pages for this patent family to go across a lot of use cases. So when I founded mrkd.art, I didn't found mrkd.art. I founded Mrkd and I bought .art.

.dj, .news, .ai, .worlds, et cetera. So we're ready for anything because we can go in any direction. The other part of this is as an IP founded company, when you're dealing with IP like I have, that is consequential to the future of user experience, or I say potentially, if it gets used. Like I said before, I'm not Google. I'm not Apple. I don't have the lawyers.

W3M - Pete (15:35)
Okay.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (15:56)
What happens when you introduce a new form of IP into the world that is important and foundational, but it's you, it's not a giant company. Then those giant companies do whatever they want and they know that they can bury you if you don't have anything to defend it with. So of course I've got to build. You have to build. You have to have defensible stuff in the market in order to then go back to them and say, you're kind of infringing. Hi, let's license. Let's be friends. Right? I want to be friends. I want a license.

W3M - Pete (16:21)
⁓

okay.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (16:24)
I want the mark to be a universal enabler of interoperability and an open spatial web. have absolutely nothing against the centralized closed spatial webs of Meta and Fortnite and Roblox. As a matter of fact, think we couldn't get to an open spatial web without them, but they're still fiefdoms as they are. If the products can come and go as the consumer pleases and as the creators, the brands please. And of course,

those centralized platforms make plenty of the products themselves. Then we have a real open fair market where it's provenance. That's the only thing that keeps changing between the spaces. I may use a Fortnite avatar, ready player me. I use that avatar in one place and I take it to another and another. What's the change? The formats are different, but my provenance is updating both times.

W3M - Pete (17:12)
Good. I get that. You still didn't, you know, I still didn't. Yeah.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (17:17)
Answer about music, Keith Shocklee. Keith Shocklee, Keith Shocklee.

This man has defined remixing more than, in my opinion, anybody else in the world. He started off as a kid in the 70s with his brother Hank doing mixtapes, selling them on the streets. I have an amazing recorded story of him talking about the first time that he sampled. We're going to make that an NFT as part of the first album drop that we do as another part of the collection.

During that time, he found Flav, Flava Flav, he introduced him to Chuck D. He's built a bomb squad with his brother. He was doing Spectrum City. All of this before Public Enemy did anything. And Public Enemy, and so he did this with a, I think it was a Chuck Berry song was the first thing he sampled and the NBC boom, boom, boom sound.

But one of the Public Enemy's songs is one of the most sampled songs of all time, and it itself has 10 songs that are sampled inside of it. That's the point. We need to open and create fluidity with all of this IP. It's important for people to get properly compensated for their IP. But at the expense of freedom of use, you get a black market and you get a

shutting down of creativity. That's possible because nobody creates anything original. It's always standing on other people's stuff, regardless of sampling or not, just as a philosophy. So what are, you know, what are we, what are we trying to do here? We're just trying to free. We're trying to unleash the beat and there's no better person to do that than Keith. That's why he had to be the front man in this company. And as soon as he did, we pivoted hard from art to music because we're still only one team.

W3M - Pete (18:38)
Right, pretty much. Totally agree.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (18:59)
We still have a lot of stuff built up in the space, but we have an amazing CTO, Matt Hampton, who built an amazing backend that's Lego bricks. So all we have to do is mix it around for, from art to DJ in terms of how the things work because of Frank Corsi, who's the creator of not only blockchain names, but he was part of the original DNS naming service. Like the guy came up with names for URLs in the first place among other people, and now he did it for blockchain. That's the chain we're using.

So between those talents, we have simple API hookups, which make it simple for everybody else. And we move forward from there.

W3M - Pete (19:32)
I think, we have... yeah, yeah, it definitely did. And...

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (19:32)
I hope that answered your question this time along with other stuff.

Sorry, the whole, the long and short of it

was just, we know how to pivot. The team saw the opportunity, Keith Shocklee, we pivoted hard at the end.

W3M - Pete (19:44)
No, no, I love the story. It's...

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (19:47)
And also music is a much larger TAM than our.

W3M - Pete (19:49)
Right. It's, you know, so I'm, I'm fan of both of art and music, especially in digital, in digital form, simply because I move around a lot. That's, you know, I'm a huge fan of NFTs

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (19:54)
and we'll be coming back to art.

However, think about how it changes the idea of ownership again, because, you know, digital music, doesn't have an object, we give it an object. But at the same time, if you have a Gucci bag, my God, is that an expensive thing? But what did you really pay for the brand? The Gucci bag is a few hundred bucks. The bag as a cost, the price you paid or the value of it is six, $10,000. That's all brand. So with NFTs,

That's just a digital receipt. When you get back to that point of what an NFT is, which is just an immutable, safe, secure, unbreakable receipt, now apply receipt to the commercialized industry, my Gucci bag is going to have, and already has, a Roblox version of it, and a Fortnite version, and a Decentraland version, and maybe an immersive version, or maybe a smell augmented.

Who knows? Gucci is now free to express like any artist, however they want the bag to be. But that doesn't necessarily devalue the bag, but it increases the collective values and utilities of what you actually own to the point that if you own the brand, the bag doesn't matter so much. And if you lose the bag, then we just fork your chain and you get a new bag because it's not that big a cost to them as long as it's official.

W3M - Pete (21:18)
Right. I think that actually is a nice segway to the question, which I always have to everybody who talks about NFTs. one of the things which always bugged me about NFTs and immutability and blockchain and all that, is unless the NFTs are fully on chain, it's really not that secure, not that immutable

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (21:33)
Mm.

W3M - Pete (21:41)
many different layers you sort of depend on to actually get to that thing which you paid for.

but how can you prove that this is your picture when there is nothing at the end? And it sort of bugs me even more when you say, this is IP. How do you resolve that?

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (21:57)
Sure. Well,

a couple ways. One, some context. I own my house. No, I don't. I have a deed with my name on it. That's what I own.

so put that in place for everything else and how you think about what ownership is. don't think you're questioning that people can safely and securely own the NFT. What you're talking about is, bootlegging the media or, know, the, the chain is secure. It's the ends that are a problem. So part of why we're using a name chain and references, plain upfront in the user experience, English, your wallet is not all of these letters of numbers.

The same way it's your name. The same way that we went from Compuserve where your email was 1070956ab at Compuserve to jamie at aol.com. That was a huge innovation just using English. And it made a lot of helpful sense because what happens after your name jamie Schwarz dot DJ dot Keith Shocklee. Keith Shocklee. Who owns Keith Shocklee? The one person that could mark that. Keith Shocklee username.

He's the only one with a key and access to that. That's on us, a centralized platform, to be the only one that gives him that access. However, what that shows is your critique of blockchain as being something that can be messed with is based on the philosophy that it can take away the role of trusted centralized institutions. It's just a trustless system. 100 % disagree with that. It is a strengthener.

of our need for centralized institutions that exist on both ends of the chain. The chain is only there to get us across an open spatial web so we can have an open spatial web. I do not know who said this quote and I'm going to mess it up, but it's something to the effect of a world without borders has a million little fortresses.

W3M - Pete (23:36)
Huh?

Okay.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (23:51)
If we had giant collective centralized institutions, Visa, great, it's on Visa. Somebody stole whatever, I don't worry. Visa, we'll take care of it. Centralized institution, blockchain. Uh-oh, somebody stole my Bitcoin, tough, right? That's that problem. Nobody broke the chain. It's still not there. We need the centralized institutions. What's the use case for blockchain in that space?

W3M - Pete (24:05)
You

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (24:17)
We have to be careful about the maxis who say it's for everything. It's a tool, AI. It's a tool. Whatever it is, find the right spaces for it and use it in those right spaces. We believe in using blockchain also for tokenizing value, but value that exists. I'm not for Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a store of computational ones and zeros mathematically.

W3M - Pete (24:21)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

my

god, we just lost the 100,000 maxis on Bitcoin. But it's okay. No worries.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (24:42)
It's computation powered.

no. well, sorry. But where's

that value based on? To be fair, what have we based on value the whole time? Shells, salt, silver, gold. But there's a value in gold that we've all agreed to. And the reason why blockchain, sorry, Bitcoin would work is if everybody agrees Bitcoin has value. The same way that my Thai beanie baby has value. You know? So if we want to create

W3M - Pete (25:07)
Yep.

Yep, agreed, agreed.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (25:15)
a token based on all the collective IP of our catalog of music that's available and fractionalize that into tokens that are then usable to interchange on the system. We've then created the first Fiat based on the value of music.

W3M - Pete (25:24)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, yeah.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (25:32)
people

are trading IP and music. Here's two riffs of Stairway to Heaven so that I can buy this track, you know? It's obviously not that, but you know what I mean. That's what we can do with it. The same thing can be done for art. Go to the world's galleries and say, all of that can be put together into one giant Fort Knox of IP, digitally twinned, so it doesn't have to leave the museums or do anything, and liquidate it into fiat. And all of a sudden all the museums get

all the value of their art while still holding onto it because there's a whole other level of utility that was opened up from it. There's new values to unlock with blockchain and that is a huge economic deal. That's why I believe when BlackRock, says something like real world asset tokenization is going to create a $7 trillion economy in 10 years. What? Yeah, I believe it because of all those different things that have to happen.

The value of a digitally twin building is not efficiency. That's a very small first low hanging fruit value. It's a great one and we should use it. But then we have shared spaces and then we have real world asset tokenization and we have interchanges of secondary sale parts of the building. Like one of my clients is class after care who's built out FIMS under brand therapy.

And that's the digital transformation thought leader platform for the facade management space, where when you digitally twin a building, you're not just creating more efficiencies. You're creating a secondary market for where those facades can go afterwards that you can then borrow against.

W3M - Pete (27:05)
Okay, well, interesting.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (27:05)
while you still have them. That's

completely different kinds of new values that would never have been able to exist otherwise.

W3M - Pete (27:11)
Yeah.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (27:13)
which is different than

trying to sell, hey, would you put some solar panels on your building because it may be expensive right now, but you'll save over time.

W3M - Pete (27:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (27:18)
Which I have,

I have solar panels, it's amazing. It's free electricity, it's amazing.

W3M - Pete (27:23)
Where are you based? Are you in US or UK?

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (27:25)
I am in a US town that sounds like I'm in the UK, Hastings-on-Hudson. We are the first small town north of New York City. So I literally just drove, I teach at CCNY City College, New York, which is 25 minute drive from me. But our town is 8,000 people.

W3M - Pete (27:32)
Hastings on Hudson okay.

⁓

Okay.

So you are basically on my way to Boston, right?

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (27:47)
Yeah, but very quickly after New York, like you'd pass this by and wouldn't even know it. But yes.

W3M - Pete (27:49)
Very quickly, all right.

Nice. it. first I am very happy that we established that you are not Bitcoin maxi and that you don't think that blockchains solve everything and we can live without the centralized institutions because that's relatively rare, honestly. Part. Yeah.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (28:10)
We need trust, we need centralized institutions, we're

still humans, we're not going anywhere. And on top of that, we do have to solve the quantum problem.

W3M - Pete (28:17)
And so that is perfect segway to, a pitch for the Mrkd DJ, which you guys are launching.

June 6 June things in New York, right?

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (28:28)
at the knitting factories, Baker Falls, which is, yeah, so the knitting factory is, it's one of those, you know, places that has a lot of story in it as well in New York City. And the space they moved into is the old pyramid, another space with a lot of psychic residue. So I just toured the space, they just opened. It's a tight personal space. This is the corner of right off of First and First on Allen Street. So the nexus of the universe, it's a great place.

W3M - Pete (28:31)
Wonderful.

⁓ really? Okay. Never been.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (28:54)
But in that location, Keith is going to be on stage, DJing a live set. And what he performs will instantly, at the end of the night, be on every single 250 of these first limited editions. Thank you. But this mean, this object could be anything. It could be a tour t-shirt with dates on it. And then I can get POAPs for all the different.

W3M - Pete (29:08)
I love these vinyls

Sure.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (29:19)
concerts I went to that were on the list and add value.

W3M - Pete (29:20)
But you know, the

thing is, it's just, when you show something which looks like a vinyl to somebody who likes music, it just instantly speaks to you, right? It's like, yeah, sure, it can be hundreds of other things, but...

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (29:30)
Mm-hmm.

The funny part is Keith, we're

doing this for launch, but Keith immediately wants us to move to mixtapes and not just a regular, like this is not real vinyl. is transformed coaster basically, but ⁓ he wants to do real mixtapes where there's a one of one that has an NFC chip on it. And then you can do copies off of that, but that just like the Wu Tang album, there was only one.

W3M - Pete (29:45)
Good.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (29:56)
but it's locked. How can we actually get proper compensation, proper IP transfer in a way that everybody can enjoy it instead of just locking up the music? So once everybody gets this instant drop, we'll then be dripping on capabilities over the next month. So they'll be able to social share it. People will be able to play it. People will be able to click on it and instantly buy it directly by a second edition copy from it.

And that means that every owner of the first edition is making money off of selling for Keith his music. but it also means we're hoping we get a majority DJs, at the event. and because the goal is not to just give it to everybody to go, yeah, cool. I own this music, which is from an amazing, history defining night, but for them to remix it too. Our title of the, of the party is remix the remix.

W3M - Pete (30:44)
So I see.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (30:44)
We don't

just mean we're going to remix the remix industry. We mean you get to keep remixing remixes. It's an infinite drop.

W3M - Pete (30:51)
Mm-hmm.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (30:52)
So everybody gets to play with everybody else's music and everybody gets to profit.

W3M - Pete (30:55)
So I have to ask, is the night fully booked or are there any spaces?

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (31:00)
If you go now

to Mrkd.dj, MRKD.DJ, you'll see a New York Tech Week, because we're associated with New York Tech Week, link in the top that'll take you to a partyful link where you can buy your ticket. Heads up, it's $200. But what you're getting with that is not just the night. You're getting the first edition album that you'll be able to sell 250 copies of, remix yourself, and...

I don't know how else to explain it. Like you get that thing. You're only one of those people that gets that thing. And you'll have access to this instrument that nobody else will have access to. ⁓ Yeah. And this is a... ⁓

W3M - Pete (31:34)
Well, I see

the value. I'm not coming because I'm sitting in Europe now.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (31:41)
We're also

look, we're a startup. This is a $500 product that we're doing under a $200 ticket that you get for free with your ticket. you know, startups be start up and but but yeah, it's a big deal.

W3M - Pete (31:50)
Yeah, sure. And, but I am already

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (31:54)
So as I said with the instant drop, we are dripping out new capabilities. So when people get the album, they won't be able to remix it that day. So all of these capabilities keep getting added for a while. So we have quite a rather thick roadmap of utility to build out. But in the long run,

Besides music, we are definitely getting back to art. We already have a number of galleries and a number of artists that we've already promised a lot to that we are getting back to as soon as we can. But we're also doing world building. So we're talking with authors who have multiple books in a series, have built a bit of a world, character owners, comics, the places where there's potential to world build. And think of the name chain with .worlds.

so that you can interoperate between these mediums and co-create because one of the most untapped markets in the creative space is fan fiction. There's billions.

W3M - Pete (32:46)
Right. I definitely,

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (32:48)
We're doing Mark DJ at launch. you don't, another rule of startups is, we're not even for everybody. We are a DJ focused brand right now. We're not even for the casual listener who would want to be streaming, because why would we take them away from

W3M - Pete (32:50)
Okay.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (33:02)
all the music they could want for $10 a month. Enjoy. You're not going to be remixing. You're not going to be wanting to get affiliate fees. But when we get back to art, imagine having something like a gallery of digital art that you have in your house that you didn't pay a penny for that are all just an affiliate store. So if anybody sees your art and likes it and buys it because of you. So now we have art with the encouragement of the artist up everywhere promoting.

I get something I get art to look at without right clicking and you get promotion all without any purchases happening because it stays on chain.

and derivatives so I can buy a copy. Because if I buy a poster of the Mona Lisa, it's not worth anything. What's point of that? But of course the Louvre wants you to buy their poster. Why would I do that? Because it actually is sharing the same provenance and it's from the same family tree as the original and shares that provenance too.

W3M - Pete (33:58)
Right. So this is a technicality, which I think most people don't really appreciate, honestly. if I am, imagine I'm a DJ, I'm not, but you know, if I want, if I start with, yeah, so if I start with like pd.dj, but I'm a DJ who also creates art because I'm not just one dimensional person, which I believe a lot of artists are.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (34:02)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

DJ DJ for leaf. I like your hat.

here's a fun part.

So they're all, your name goes across the different functions, DJ, art, et cetera. We do sell different products. So you can't really do much without in the DJ space, if you don't buy the ability to have a player or your DJ mixer. In art, you can't really do much if you don't have the digital canvas in order to put your signature with. So those are products within our sphere of creation, but they're sold. There's no sass.

W3M - Pete (34:33)
Okay.

Right?

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (34:52)
This is ownership. This is about tools that you then use to do whatever you want to do. And your name is the same. You get Pete.DJ, you get Pete.Art.

W3M - Pete (34:58)
Right, so you're basically saying

Peter .art Peter .dj Okay, got it. Okay.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (35:03)
Which yeah,

so that means if you get onto MRKD.dj and you register your name, you don't have to worry about .art, .music, .worlds, .news. It's all covered. When you sign in, it's first come first serve, which is another reason to get on the platform now.

W3M - Pete (35:18)
I see. Now I get it.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (35:21)
There's a wonderful program called Tribe XR that allows you to just have like a web-based XR experience of DJing with a virtual DJ setup. Go for it. You know, we look forward to being compatible with them one day.

W3M - Pete (35:28)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (35:34)
we have to build one product at a time. So Mark DJ, great place to start, great person to start with, great chain to start with, great IP to start with. We've got those three magic things.

W3M - Pete (35:36)
Totally agree.

No, no, totally agree.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (35:44)
There's a lovely Squarespace site up on mrkd.art. We were doing it for a full year. We were ready to go. We had galleries lined up and then Keith came in and the big pivot happened because of the alignment.

and the opportunity that he presented us with and everything that we can do in the space. And frankly, the lack of large enough institutions. We had some really impressive ones, but enough momentum with art to justify sticking with it when there's a larger TAM and more momentum right in front of us.

launch as many times as you want, be as loud as you want.

Try to get as much traction as you can, but be okay starting over again. We're not Mark .art right now. We're Mark DJ right now. I just switched my banner on LinkedIn from Mark .art to Mark DJ last week, and I've been doing only Mark DJ since January.

W3M - Pete (36:27)
Totally.

let's get towards the end. So, what is something people should take away from today

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (36:39)
Okay.

W3M - Pete (36:45)
there is always something I forgot to ask which is important to my guests. I always want to give you a chance to talk about it.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (36:51)
honestly, as a startup founder, all I want is input. So if you're at all interested in Mark DJ, email us info at mark.dj. I will respond immediately by startup standards, whatever that means in two seconds or two weeks. I don't know because I don't know what we'll be doing, but I will respond. I want to know your thoughts. I want to know what you're interested in. What I'm trying to bring into the world. What I want to get across here is so much bigger than music. It's just that music is so emblematic of an IP future.

where we need to get to the point where our ideas are worth more than they are today, are capturable better than they are today, aren't exploited like they are today. So we can properly move into an IP economy because the service economy is going away just like the others did before them. There will always be services, but AI is going to take a lot of them. So with IP being something that we actually own and AI doesn't,

That's the way I want us to move forward and I have the best solution in my mind for it. That's, guess, what I get across. Side note, I guess, I practice company betterment. This is something that I was doing the whole time. Brandtherapy.coach is my day job. I'm the co-founder of the Team Flow Institute. We really do focus on companies being self-aware. So we practice this in our own company. We gave ourself our own

W3M - Pete (37:53)
Hehehe.

Mm-hmm.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (38:13)
assessment, we have a very high trust score in our team. but we're our aim is called team flow. It's a different reason. We're, we aim as a team for team flow and that's for any company that could be a time. IBM needs to be going for this at the same time as any startup. It's just a different way looking at how we do work. And with all the, as you know, all the different startups you've been through, they're all different and yet they're all the same. It always comes down to.

W3M - Pete (38:27)
Okay.

you

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (38:39)
trust and focus and progress and unity. And those are now measurable thanks to these companies. So I'm proud of them and I'll shout them out till the rooftops come home. And if you're gonna let me keep going, I'm gonna say shout out to my team. Caitlin Duffy, CMO, Nancy Ahola, COO, Tu Do, who's our head of product, Hallie Hopkins, who is our connection to Keith, who's head of production.

Ganesh Hegde, who is a co-founder, has been with me the longest and even has his name on one of the patents, is our blockchain developer. And Matt Hampton is our CTO at Envoy Design. Frank Corse, blockchain names. Hans Hansen, Paran 3D, because we do virtual capture as well. Because you got it, if you're going to be in a 3D space, you got to be in 3D space.

W3M - Pete (39:18)
Okay.

Yeah.

True. Wonderful. I give you credit. You are the first founder or co-founder, whoever actually gave shout out to the whole team. I assume there was a whole team.

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (39:33)
Bullshit.

I'm actually sitting here going like, God, who is going to be mad at me right now that I have forgotten?

W3M - Pete (39:38)
No,

who do you forgot?

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (39:41)
I think I'm okay.

that's, I call bullshit. That's gotta be insane. I mean, that's like, I'm doing a pitch class right now. And he said, you get one slide. And same thing. I showed my team slide and nobody else did, but I said like, if you're gonna show one slide, who are you hiring? This is what I'd like you to focus on. If you're interested, we can keep talking about the company.

W3M - Pete (40:01)
No, very smart. Honestly, really it's like 50 episodes in, you were the first person who actually named the whole team and gave them a shout out. There's a lot of people who mentioned like, you know, of course I couldn't do it alone, whatever, but it's a first time. So congratulations.

Jamie, thank you very much. I'll make sure we get published before June 6th. I will also make sure that I'll send you a link to join Farcaster.

and I'll connect you with Coop and Coop Records because I think you guys would hit it off they are trying to get music on chain and so are you thank you very much for the time

Jaime Schwarz - MRKD.dj Founder (40:31)
Yes.

I'm looking forward to seeing you on-chain.

W3M - Pete (40:42)
Likewise, thanks a lot. Everybody, don't forget to subscribe of course, go follow Jamie and definitely if you are any way into music just consider joining and remixing the Mark DJ Launch Set.