One copy. Locked until 2103.

Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was recorded in secret between 2007 and 2013 and pressed as a single physical copy, housed in a hand-carved nickel-silver and leather box. The double album was sold at auction in 2015. The buyer, revealed later by a US Department of Justice forfeiture filing, was the pharmaceutical investor Martin Shkreli. The sale price was $2,238,482.30, the exact amount Shkreli owed the government.

After Shkreli's federal conviction the album was forfeited and resold. The digital art collective PleasrDAO acquired it in two transactions in 2021 and 2024, for a combined $4.75 million, and bought the copyrights for an additional $750,000.

The terms of the original contract barred commercial release until 2103. The owner can play the album privately. They can host listening events. They cannot stream it or sell copies of the audio. In June 2024 Shkreli livestreamed the album to roughly 5,000 viewers on X. PleasrDAO sued him for diminishing the asset's value.

It is the purest test of the thesis underneath every direct-to-fan sale. If the audio file is the only thing the audience pays for, the price drifts to zero. If the audio is wrapped in something scarce, including the editorial setting and the artist's deliberate decision about how it reaches the listener, the price holds.

Set aside the crypto wrapping the second sale picked up. The principle of the work was set in 2013, before any of that existed: one album, one copy, the file deliberately removed from circulation, the value located somewhere else.