Nfts
Wu-Tang Clan’s Secret Album ‘Shaolin’ Will Be Sold Via $1 NFTs Based
In a curve movement, Pleasr, a crypto collective or DAO which collects culturally significant items, announced Thursday that it will soon begin selling encrypted and on-chain copies of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan record that Pleasr acquired in 2021 for $4 million.
The encrypted album will be made available today via a dedicated space website for $1, according to a press release shared with Decrypt. THE NFT will live Basethe climb Ethereum Coinbase’s layer 2 scaling network, and their distribution will be managed by Pleasr in collaboration with Privy, Crossmint and Holograph.
Thanks to Wu-Tang Clan’s unique deal to sell a single copy of the album in 2015, the owners of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” until today had no the right to commercially exploit the disc until 2103.
Please, however, say Decrypt he worked in secret with the album’s producers, over the past six months, to secure exclusive marketing rights to as much music as possible from the album.
Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” album. Photo: Plaisir
So far, the DAO claims to have successfully acquired the rights to 16 of the album’s 31 tracks. It will now share larger and larger pieces of this curated library with buyers of the encrypted album over time, effectively decrypting the album for holders, piece by piece.
Pleasr members who helped negotiate the deal trace its importance to a decade ago, when the Wu-Tang Clan sold a single copy of an album it had produced in secret for six years, as a means to protest what they saw as the broken model of the deal. promote music in an increasingly digital world.
“This album was created to challenge what it means to value music in the digital world,” said Leighton Cusack, one of the founders of Pleasr. Decrypt.
Blockchain technology appears to many Pleasr members as the answer to this question.
“This is the new technology that allows us to bring ownership back to the digital world,” Cusack continued. “And does this restore value to music?
Key to the “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” experience is Pleasr’s expectation that many, if not most, buyers of the on-chain album will be hip-hop fans, not die-hard users. crypto toughs.
Matt Matkov, a representative for Pleasr, emphasized that the goal of releasing the album is to bring blockchain technology into the cultural mainstream – a feat that can only be achieved by engaging with the cultural mainstream himself.
“The problem is that this industry has the right to its own financial system,” Matkov said. Decrypt. “But if it wants to develop with Web2, it does not have the right to its own IP system.”
To this end, the technology behind the album’s release has been designed to be as user-friendly as possible. The album will be available to purchase via credit card or Apple Pay as part of an off-chain payment flow. Users will then have crypto wallets created for them, and NFTs will be created and deposited, in a process that will be largely obfuscated to the user.
The encrypted album will also be airmailed to some lucky shareholders. Mainly as a nod to long-running rumors on Reddit that Pleasr planned to release “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” to holders of the popular meme stock GameStop (GME), holders of the popular meme stock who check their position will receive a free airdrop. copy of the album.
In this way, the core of the album release, said PleasrDAO Decryptit was understood that the DAO would allow the producers and artists involved in the record to profit significantly from the distribution of the work.
They will receive a share of the revenue generated by the sale of these encrypted albums; they will also be allowed to perform songs from the album in concert venues and release the record on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music in the future (and collect royalties on those avenues as well).
On Tuesday, Pleasr sued “pharmaceutical brother” Martin Shkreli for keeping copies of the album and distributing them online. A federal judge has temporarily banned Shkreli to play it.
The DAO positioned Thursday’s announcement as a rebuke to Shkreli’s treatment of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.”
“Our lawsuit was a last resort because Martin illegally released music without paying the artists whose work we agreed to manage,” the organization wrote on Twitter. “We will legally release the music and ensure artists get paid in the process.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to clarify Matkov’s role in Pleasr.