New York (AFP)
At the end of July, American justice announced the auction of the album "Once upon a time in Shaolin" to settle the sentence of Martin Shkreli, the provocative and hated pharmaceutical entrepreneur who had offered himself before his fall.
The buyers, who remained secret at the time, finally came out of the woods.
In a video uploaded on Wednesday, PleasrDAO, a group of collectors of NFT ("non-fungible token"), these theoretically unique and non-piratable digital objects thanks to blockchain technology, announced that they were offered this double album of 31 tracks, of which there is only one copy.
Purchase price: $ 4 million, according to several US media, whose articles were retweeted by PleasrDAO.
The group is known among collectors at NFT for having previously purchased digital works from American whistleblower Edward Snowden or Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot.
The video uploaded shows one of the leaders of PleasrDAO, Jamis Johnson, opening the precious silver box in which is the album and a handwritten booklet, then uncorking the champagne while listening to a track, headphones on the head.
The only copy of this 31-track double album would have been recorded between the end of the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s by the Wu-Tang Clan band, hip-hop legends known for their texts on the harshness of the neighborhoods. poor people in New York, especially in Staten Island, and their samples inspired by martial arts films.
At the time, they wanted to denounce the commodification of music and protected the work, now seen by some as a precursor of NFT, by a clause prohibiting the marketing of the album before 88 years, i.e. 2103.
But on its site, PleasrDAO hopes to share it before.
"While we are bound by the legal agreement that accompanies this work of art and may not be able to duplicate and share the music in digital form, we are confident that there are ways to share this musical masterpiece with the whole world ", writes the collective.
© 2021 AFP