In an unexpected move, Pleasr, a crypto collective or DAO which collects objects of cultural relevance, announced on Thursday that it will soon begin selling encrypted online copies of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the Wu-Tang Clan single album that Pleasr acquired in 2021 for US$4 million.
The encrypted album will be made available today via a dedicated website website for $1, according to a press release shared with Decrypt. O NFTs will live Baseincrease Ethereum Coinbase’s layer 2 scaling network, and its distribution will be handled by Pleasr in collaboration with Privy, Crossmint and Holograph.
Thanks to the unique agreement reached by the Wu-Tang Clan when they sold a single copy of the album in 2015, the owners of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” were – until today – prohibited from commercially exploiting the album until 2103.
Please, however, said Decrypt has been working in secret with the album’s producers over the past six months to obtain exclusive marketing rights to as many of the album’s songs as possible.
Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” album. Photo: Pleasr
To date, DAO claims to have managed to acquire the rights to 16 of the album’s 31 tracks. It will now share increasingly larger chunks 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 significance back to a decade ago, when the Wu-Tang Clan sold a single copy of an album they produced in secret for six years as a way to protest what they saw as a failed model. of valuing music in an increasingly digital world.
“This album was created to question what it means to value music in the digital world,” said Leighton Cusack, one of the founders of Pleasr. Decrypt.
Blockchain technology seems to many Pleasr members like the answer to that question.
“This is the new technology that allows us to bring property back into the digital world,” continued Cusack. “And this now makes music valuable again?”
Key to the “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” experiment is Pleasr’s expectation that many – if not most – of the album’s on-chain buyers will be hip-hop fans rather than die-hard crypto users.
Pleasr representative 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 through engagement with the cultural mainstream itself.
“The whole point is that this industry has the right to its own financial system,” said Matkov Decrypt. “But if you want to grow with Web2, you don’t have the right to your own IP system.”
To that end, the technology underlying the album release was created to be as easy to use as possible. The album can be purchased with a credit card or Apple Pay in an off-network payment flow. Users will then have crypto wallets created for them, and NFTs minted and deposited, in a process that will be largely obfuscated to the user.
The encrypted album will also be distributed to some lucky shareholders. Primarily 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 verify their position will be released free on air. copy of the album.
Central to releasing the album this way, PleasrDAO said Decryptit was an understanding 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 from sales of these encrypted albums; They will also be allowed to play songs from the album at live venues and release the record on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music in the future (and earn royalties through those avenues as well).
On Tuesday, Pleasr sued “pharmacist brother” Martin Shkreli for withholding copies of the album and playing them for the public online. A federal judge temporarily banned Shkreli from playing.
The DAO positioned Thursday’s announcement as a rebuke of 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 be releasing the music legally and ensuring the 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.
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