#1560 2015 · Wu-Tang Clan · music
Press One Copy of the Album, Sell It as Art
问题
Streaming erased recorded music's scarcity; albums could no longer command premium prices.
背景
The Wu-Tang Clan recorded a secret double album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and pressed a single copy, delivered in a silver case with a pair of customized speakers worth $55,000. In November 2015 the sole copy was sold through the auction house Paddle8 for an undisclosed figure in the millions to an anonymous American buyer.
The sale's terms made the object art: the buyer may not commercially exploit the music for 88 years, keeping the recording out of public release for the better part of a century. After buyer Martin Shkreli's securities-fraud conviction, the US government seized and resold the album.
换别人会怎么做
Release the album everywhere and monetize the streams.
他们看到了什么
Music became free by becoming infinitely copyable, so sell what can't be copied: the master object. One copy plus a long embargo converts an album from media into art, and an auction sets a price no stream ever could.
那一手
Manufacture scarcity where the format destroyed it. By pressing exactly one copy and attaching an 88-year commercial embargo, the album is priced as a unique artwork rather than a replicable recording: copyright and object are deliberately severed, the buyer owns an artifact whose value an auction sets, and the group retains the music's commercial future until the embargo lapses.
为什么管用
Auction dynamics price uniqueness; the embargo makes ownership legitimately exclusive rather than merely legal; secrecy and ritual, private listening events, museum loans, add the provenance that is the art market's real currency.
值了多少
Sold for millions via Paddle8 in 2015 with an 88-year embargo; later seized by the US government after the buyer's fraud conviction.
什么时候会失灵
It works only for an act with mythology to monetize; the mass audience hears nothing for decades, ceding the market to streams; and buyers matter, as the album's story became a fraud-case footnote precisely because of who bought it.
后来呢
The extreme case of scarcity-as-art in music, later exhibited as a museum loan, and a permanent reference point in debates over what a recording is worth.
资料来源
- [1]Wu-Tang Clan album bought by Martin Shkreli sold by US governmentBBC News, 2021bbc.com
- [2]Wu-Tang Clan's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin sold at auctionThe Guardian, 2015theguardian.com