Last year Wu-Tang Clan announced that they have recorded a special album one-off album that would be sold as a piece of art to the highest bidder.
12 months later, and this week it has been revealed that someone has bought the album, called ‘Wu: Once Upon A Time In Shaolin’, for a undisclosed fee thought to be in the “millions” making it the most expensive album in human history.
Robert “RZA” Riggs explained the concept in a interview with Forbes earlier this year, “We’re about to put out a piece of art like nobody else has done in the history of [modern] music. We’re making a single-sale collector’s item. This is like somebody having the scepter of an Egyptian king.”
The album consists of tracks featuring all surviving members of the group and is said to 128 minutes long, it’s housed in a stunning one-off hand-carved nickel box and features leather-bound liner notes for all the tracks. As well as that, the new owner also gets a pair of $55,000 speakers to listen to the album on.
“The Wu-Tang Clan have always been driven by innovation, and this marks another moment in musical history,” said Wu-Tang’s RZA in the statement, stating that the group would be donating a significant portion of the sale to charity. “From the beginning, we hoped that this concept would inspire debate and new ways of seeing creativity. Both of those goals have been achieved, and the ideas continue to evolve.”
So who bought the album? Well, no one really knows, apart from the Wu-Tang Clan and the auction house Paddle8 of course – but it’s been suggested that long-time fan, and friend of RZA, Quentin Tarantino might have bought the album. He’s been huge fan of the Wu for ages and shares an appreciation of old martial arts films with RZA.
“We pioneered a new type of intellectual property regarding the sale of a work that is simultaneously physical and digital, creating previously unexplored legal protections for a unique work that cannot be reproduced,” explains Paddle8 cofounder Alexander Gilkes. “This marks an exciting new model of distribution for the music world and we look forward to playing an ongoing role in this innovative model.
Via Forbes
