Wu-Tang Clan will sell only one copy of new album | Hacker News Reader

Wu-Tang Clan will sell only one copy of new album

pitchfork.com

28 pointsrobrenaud39 comments

>visitors will be charged a price to listen to the 128-minute, 31 song album on headphones provided by the venue. (Rigorous security checks will discourage the possibility of any illegal recording.)

Could a powered recording device be made small enough to fit in the ear canal? Searching for "In-Ear Binaural microphones" finds some fairly small devices (they require external power and storage, though)

What about a remote TEMPEST attack?

What about a night-shift guard with a male-male audio cable and any device with a microphone jack.

    1) They are artists.
    2) Artists do weird things.
    3) This will be released.
       a) There's no way they can resist.
       b) They need the ego boost.
    4) There's nothing illegal about recording it.
    5) It's only illegal to distribute it.
    6) It's an experiment.
    7) They will gain much press.

Paying some exorbitant ticket price to sit for over 2 hours in an isolated, monitored environment for a single play-through of a rap album? I can't imagine a less enjoyable listening experience.

Artificially inducing scarcity in order to increase value is an interesting experiment, but this doesn't seem like the way to do it. At some point on this tour, some handler is going to have 5 minutes alone with the album, at which point they'll immediately make a copy and leak it.

Nevertheless, the original will sell for a small fortune. Genuine scarcity will always be a good reason to pay lots of money.

"Artificially inducing scarcity in order to increase value is an interesting experiment"

This is an interesting experiment in another (more extreme) way of doing that, but "artificially inducing scarcity in order to increase value" is the basis of much intellectual property.

I'm not so sure I agree with that statement. Intellectual property (as it applies to digital goods) is rarely about inducing scarcity. The purpose of IP-protection tools (DRM) isn't typically to limit the availability of a product-- it's to limit possession of a product such that the quantity possessed is equal to the quantity purchased (the attempt to minimize piracy).

There have been cases where companies have tried to artificially induce scarcity--I recall that during the release of a certain Battlefield game, EA's storefront had temporarily "sold out" of digital copies--and in that case, the same DRM-based distribution tech that was designed for IP protection was being used to induce scarcity.

In other words, if ten people are trying to purchase your product, IP enforcement means you want exactly ten copies to exist. Inducing artificial scarcity means you want fewer than ten copies to exist.

It's hard to find examples of artificial scarcity in the digital world, which is what makes this somewhat interesting to me. However, in the brick and mortar world, the diamond industry is a good example.

edit: it's worth noting that the handcrafted case is a legitimately unique item, so in that sense, the scarcity of the complete package is real, not artificial.

"In other words, if ten people are trying to purchase your product, IP enforcement means you want exactly ten copies to exist."

Monopolistic rent is extracted through underproduction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pizza_Tapes

Rigorous security checks. Right.

The album will be anonymously leaked to the Internet by a trusted insider before a physical copy even makes it to the first museum. Absent that, someone on a museum's security staff will do it.

Did they forget that most bootleg recordings come from the venue's sound board, and not from some random guy in the audience?

I guess they really want to fail:

- if nobody pirates this, it means they've completely failed at producing good art/music

- if somebody pirates this, it means they've completely failed at implementing their artistic/marketing concept of "one copy album"

...one way or another, the inevitable result will be a big fat failure :)

The Forbes article on this is much better.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2014/03/26/...

It's likely this will just end up on filesharing/torrent sites depending on who buys it, how secure their recording process is, how trustworthy the recording studio personnel are etc.

They're really just selling the box.

I think that's the point. If you only expect to make 500K* from album sales, it makes sense to sell a single copy for 500K to a wealthy fan and let the content leak out to other fans.

Same pay, less work and more happy fans.

* - I don't really know what the numbers are. 500K is just an example.

Or crowdsource it and not release it until you hit 500K.

Right, this is mostly a threshold-pledge model, with the caveat that one wealthy individual could buy it up and destroy it.

What's interesting is that this model works in a world without copyright - you can always sell the first copy.

It's already recorded and I expect that RZA is doing the production himself or with trusted associates. With only one master it's not like there will be much opportunity for a factory worker to grab an early copy, either.

I could imagine a lot of Wu-Tang fans joining forces to fund a Kickstarter-type thing to buy it and release it under some permissive license.

I wonder if they even bothered clearing their samples...

To "release it", fans would have to buy the copyright, not just the album.

If there is only one copy, and it is sold, how then would the original creators establish that the works found on the copy are actually theirs?

If it is not the only copy, how would they not be liable for fraud in claiming that it is?

Other sources have speculated that the sale of the box set will include the copyright.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2014/03/26/...

Publicity stunt.

Oh, and it will deff be leaked.

I couldn't even imagine how I'd feel if something I worked on for multiple years and only made one copy of was leaked. I'd have to question my entire existence.

What's the point of working so hard on something for so long so that so few people could listen to it once?

You're operating under the assumption that Wu-Tang doesn't want this leaked. It's all a publicity stunt, and it worked.

They wouldn't sell many more in any case... unfortunately..

ps. huge Ghostface fan right here

I'm not sure how this is relevant to HN.

It can be seen as a disruption of the current meme that music is a commodity that can be duplicated ad-infinitum.

It can also be seen as an amazing statement of how pompous and out-of-touch the music industry is, and how badly we need copyright reform.

I sure as hell wouldn't go through the effort of listening to that even if it's the most divine thing i will ever hear (seriously doubt that).

Music is meant to be heard if you want to turn it into a publicity stunt keep it it's probably not worth my time anyway.

Although it would be hilarious to have a kickstarter to buy the album and rip it into mp3's for the masses to listen to :)) given how much you will be paying for i argue you should be allowed to do whatever yo want with it.

Music has no fixed meaning.

Some would argue that it is meant to be experienced, not heard.

What some people call "the greatest piece of music ever written" was composed by a deaf man, indeed Beethoven even conducted its première, setting the tempo for an orchestra he couldn't even hear. But still he got 5 standing ovations.

Or that music is just a collection of bits? And with enough storage and computing power I could generate every song every recorded by humans?

There's nothing disruptive about it.

It's artificial scarcity, which has never worked well, or for long.

the intersection of HN readers and Wu-Tang fans is surprisingly large.

Is it that surprising? Rap's hustling make it by any means mentality isn't so far from that of startup founders / ambitious people in general.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Excellent wording. That's exactly what a Hacker is all about.

I agree, it's a good mission statement for the site, but it can get lost in the general HN haze of Silicon Valley and web startups.

I work in a very different part of the country on very different things than the majority of HN as far as I can tell, but I do enjoy reading the comments and articles posted here. It bums me out when people are down on things that don't fit within that SV sphere.

> I work in a very different part of the country on very different things than the majority of HN as far as I can tell, but I do enjoy reading the comments and articles posted here. It bums me out when people are down on things that don't fit within that SV sphere.

Agreed. Hacker News doesn't always mean Silicon Valley News.

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