Photo Credit: wutangcashew / CC by 4.0
A years-long mystery surrounding the true sale price of the Wu-Tang Clan’s one-of-a-kind album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, was solved through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
FOr years, speculation and rumor swirled around the album’s government sale price after being seized from convicted ‘Pharma Bro’ exec Martin Shkreli. A new Bloomberg report highlights their four-year battle to obtain the information through a FOIA request. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has finally complied, revealing the government sold the album for $2,238,482.30. This amount precisely matches the amount Shkreli owed the government after his conviction for securities fraud.
The DOJ previously kept the sale price secret, citing trade secrets. But Bloomberg’s persistence through legal channels finally brough some transparency to the album’s sale, ending swirling rumors about the price.
The Wu-Tang Clan, led by producers Cilvaringz and RZA, created just one copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin as a protest against the depreciation of music’s value in the digital era. The act was intended to elevate the album to the realm of high art by ensuring it would be a collectible with legendary status among fans. Between transfer from safe holding to the buyer the album was stored in a vault in Casablance, Morocco and pressed onto two discs that are housed in a nickel-silver box (seen above).
In 2015, the album was sold via the auction house Paddle8. The winning bidder agreed not to publicly release or commercially exploit the music for 88 years—a period ending in 2103. Only select listening parties or exhibitions of the music were permitted during this period. Martin Shkreli purchased the album for around $2 million in this initial auction. When he was convicted and penalized by the courts, the DOJ seized the album as a part of the $7.4 million forfeiture settlement. The album was then quietly sold to a new buyer through an intermediary.
The FOIA request documents show the album was sold to a Hong Kong-based company, WTC Endeavors Limited, in 2018. The album was then acquired by the crypto collective PleasrDAO for a reported $4 million, well over the reported DOJ sale price. PleasrDAO is bound by the same limitations as Skhreli in the original purchase. After speaking with the Wu-Tang Clan, the crypto collective released a $1 five-minute sampler of the album. Each purchase of this NFT album sampler will shave 88 seconds off of the 2103 release date. So far, sales have knocked the future release date down to December 5, 2102 as of the time of writing.