The Wu-Tang Clan’s Secret ‘Shaolin’ Album Is Sold Via $1 NFTs on Base

In a curveball move, PleasrDAO, a crypto collective that collects objects of cultural relevance, announced Thursday that it will soon begin selling encrypted, on-chain copies of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the unique Wu- Tang Clan records that PleasrDAO purchased in 2021 for $4 million.

The encrypted album will be made available today via a special website for $1, according to a press release shared with Declutter. The NFTs will live on Base, Coinbase’s emerging Ethereum layer-2 scaling network, and their distribution will be handled by PleasrDAO in partnership with Privy, Crossmint, and Holograph.

Thanks to the unique deal that Wu-Tang Clan made when they sold a single copy of the album in 2015, owners of ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ were not allowed to commercially exploit the record until 2103.

However, PleasrDAO told Declutter it has spent the past six months secretly working with the album’s producers to obtain exclusive commercialization rights to as much of the album’s music as possible.

Wu-Tang Clan’s album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin”. Photo: PleasrDAO

So far, the DAO says it has managed to acquire the rights to 16 of the 31 songs on the album. It will now share larger and larger portions of that selected library with buyers of the encrypted album over time, effectively decrypting the album piece by piece for its holders.

PleasrDAO members who helped negotiate the deal date back to a decade ago, when the Wu-Tang Clan sold a single copy of an album they had secretly produced for six years as a way to protest what they saw as the broken model of the deal. appreciating music in an increasingly digital world.

“This album was created to question what it means to appreciate music in the digital world,” said Leighton Cusack, one of the founders of PleasrDAO. Declutter.

Blockchain technology seems to be the answer to that question for many members of PleasrDAO.

“This is the new technology that will allow us to actually bring ownership back to the digital world,” Cusack continued. “And does that make music valuable again?”

Key to the “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” experiment is PleasrDAO’s expectation that many – if not most – buyers of the on-chain album will be hip-hop fans, not die-hard crypto users.

PleasrDAO general counsel Matt Matkov emphasized that the goal of the album release is to bring blockchain technology into the cultural mainstream – a feat that can only be achieved by engaging with the cultural mainstream itself.

“The whole point is that this industry has the right to its own financial system,” Matkov said Declutter. “But if it wants to grow with Web2, it has no right to its own IP system.”

To this end, the technology underlying the album’s release has been made as user-friendly as possible. The album can be purchased with a credit card or Apple Pay via an off-chain payment flow. Crypto wallets will then be created for users, and the NFTs will be minted and deposited, in a process that will be largely unclear to the user.

The encrypted album will also be broadcast to certain lucky shareholders. Mostly as a nod to long-running rumors on Reddit that PleasrDAO was planning to release “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” to holders of popular meme stocks. GameStop (GME), holders of the popular meme stock who verify their position, will receive a free airdrop copy of the album.

This way is central to the album’s release, PleasrDAO said Declutterthe agreement was that the DAO would allow the producers and artists involved with the record to meaningfully benefit from the distribution of the work.

They will receive a cut of the revenue from the sales of these encrypted albums; they may also perform songs from the album at live venues in the future and release the record on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music (and receive royalties through those avenues as well).

On Tuesday, PleasrDAO sued “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli for keeping copies of the album and playing it to an online audience. A federal judge did that temporarily banned Shkreli from playing it.

The DAO positioned Thursday’s announcement as a rebuke of Shkreli’s handling 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 wanted to manage,” the organization wrote on Twitter. “We will release the music legally and make sure the artists get paid.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward