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NY Times: As any record collector can tell you, rarities – particularly one-of-a-kind pieces...could command fortunes. But those discs acquired their value long after...the musicians who recorded them became hot properties...
The Wu-Tang Clan...has decided to skip the value-accrual phase and release...only one copy of The Wu: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin...31-track(s)...that the band has worked on quietly for the last six years...It will be packaged in a hand-carved, silver and nickel box...and...will be “available for purchase and ownership by one individual only.”
...(D)epending on the buyer’s interest in maintaining exclusivity, the music could eventually be released...“The new owner will become master copy owner and owner of the producer’s publishing,” (WuTang Clan producer) Cilvaringz explained in an email...“The publishing rights of the group and appearing artists remains with them.” And if the album is bootlegged, the Wu Tang Clan will have the name and address of the person who has the only known copy.
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Okay, but my question to Wu Tang is: what happens to the rest of us?
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EndGadget.com 4/18/04: The...rap group's original idea for the release was to sell it as an ultra-limited edition package after it completes a world-tour where fans could pay between $30 and $50 apiece to listen to it once, in a single sitting, in a museum...
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Oh. And auctioning it off to one person is their idea of a BETTER idea?
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NY Times: (From) a statement signed by Cilvaringz and (Wu-Tang Clan founding member) RZA...
...Is contemporary art overvalued in an exclusive market, or are musicians undervalued in a profoundly saturated market? By adopting a 400 year old Renaissance-style approach to music, offering it as a commissioned commodity and allowing it to take a similar trajectory from creation to exhibition to sale, as any other contemporary art piece, we hope to inspire and intensify urgent debates about the future of music...and provoke questions about the value and perception of music as a work of art in today’s world.
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Sorry, but that just sounds like a fancy-pants way of saying
"Fck you fans who can't afford us."
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...(I)n an effort to free Once Upon a Time in Shaolin...to less-than-rich listeners, two fans have launched...an attempt raise enough cash to buy the album...(in order) to circumvent "some über-rich bastard from keeping it to himself like a collector's item"...and then spread the tunes online gratis...As of this writing, they've only managed to raise $1,103 of the multi-million dollar goal...
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Unfortunately, an über-rich bastard materialized:
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Endgadget 12/9/15: Martin Shkreli has a strong claim to be the most hated man on the internet...(H)e's the arsehole that bought the life-saving AIDS drug, Daraprim, and raised the price from $13.50 to $700 per pill...(T)he smirking hedge fund mogul was the mysterious buyer of the Wu-Tang Clan's one-off album...
As part of...the $2 million deal, Shkreli is now the only person in the world that's entitled to listen to the work, with public broadcast blocked until 2103 at the very earliest.
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When not hiking pill prices or paying millions for albums, Shkreli likes to do
hours-long Youtubes of him mostly staring into his webcam, which suggests that he's an über-unstable bastard as well as an über-greedy and über-cruel one. (Or is he simply an example of the saying "A fool and his money are soon parted?") At any rate, Shkreli ends up with the album and its exclusivity while WuTang ends up with $2 million dollars -- and, much to their surprise, the image of being a bunch of über-bastards who are as greedy, cruel, and unstable as Shkreli is!
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SeattlePI.com: “The sale of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was agreed upon in May, well before Martin Skhreli’s business practices came to light,” (Wu Tang Clan member) RZA writes in an email...“We decided to give a significant portion of the proceeds to charity.”
...“I was a little worried that they were going to walk out of the deal, but by then we’d closed,” (Shkreli) says...
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Wow, talk about biting the hand that feeds you: Skhreli met WuTang's price, he agreed to their terms, and forked over the money -- that's all he was
required to do! They're throwing away six years of work and nearly 2 million dollars because they don't like where the money came from? That's flat out discrimination, LOL!
So as we all bid farewell to Wu Tang's money, hiphop "street cred,"
and artistic integrity, let's hope Jon takes note of this as he goes forth with his "
We super-serve the super(rich) fan" venture. There aren't that many über-rich superfans to go around, and some of them might turn out to also be über bastards...but even über beggars can't be choosy!
P.S. And über props to comedian Dave Chappelle
because he saw this coming...