Before arenas, chart records and seven billion streams, there were borrowed basketball nets, convenience-store shifts and songs made with friends on Vancouver Island. AP Dhillon’s ascent is a study in quiet nerve - and in how Punjabi music learned to travel without asking permission.

An engineer learned to hear the mathematics inside a hook, then spent two decades turning everyday speech into Indian pop. His next calculation is bigger than another hit: building a label that lets new artists keep their own names on the work.