The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Wu-Tang Wednesdays

When I lived in Boston, I had a friend named Franky Needles who organized a party night called Wu-Tang Wednesdays. A talented rapper in his own right, Franky built cult followings for parties in both Cambridge and San Diego, which featured occasional appearances by folks across the extended Wu-Tang universe. He envisaged bringing the party to every city in the country.

That hasn’t happened (yet), but he definitely made a Wu-Tang fan out of me. And I followed along in earnest as the saga of their secretive record Once Upon a Time in Shaolin unfolded, a tale about music industry angst, secret Moroccan vaults, Cher cameos, pharma bro felons and – increasingly – web3.

Shaolin

That sentiment could have been ripped from the on-chain music builder’s bible, if such a thing existed. But this quote was published in 2014 on the Wu-Tang website, years before NFTs gained purchase. 

The “commissioned commodity” is Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, an album recorded in secret over six years. It was pressed exactly once, with its 31 songs spread across two CDs and stored in a secured vault at the Royal Mansour Hotel in Marrakech – alongside a 174-page leather-bound book of lyrics, anecdotes and behind-the-scenes photos. Master files were deleted. And legal agreements were created to stipulate the record could not be commercially exploited for the 88 years following its 2015 “release.”

It’s the stuff of lore, which unfurled across our imaginations, including rumors that the contract stipulated the collective – or Bill Murray – would get one legitimate heist-style shot at stealing back the record. (In 2003, Wu-Tang Clan members RZA and GZA did appear with Murray in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes back, but there’s still no evidence that anyone’s tried to burgle the LP.)

Shaolin’s first and only public performance happened in 2015 in Queens, where the collective played 13 minutes of the album for 150 “art experts, rap fans and potential buyers” – all of whom were hitherto searched for recording devices. Various news outlets at the event shared hot takes and factoids that have since been pieced together into some partial composite of the record’s story, which apparently includes a declaration from Cher: "Wu-Tang baby, they rock the world.” Indeed.

The album was auctioned and sold to a single buyer for a reported $2 million, making it the most expensive musical work ever sold. Infamously, the winning bidder was Martin Shkreli, the disgraced CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Three years later, Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud and his assets – Once Upon a Time in Shaolin among them – were seized by the US government.

In July 2021, to cover Shkreli’s debts, the Department of Justice sold the record for $4 million to PleasrDAO, a crypto collective that collects objects – at that time, mostly NFTs – of cultural reverence. Aside from DAO ownership, though, there didn’t seem to be other web3 mechanics at play – until recently.

A couple weeks ago, PleasrDAO sued Shkreli for allegedly making copies of the record and distributing them publicly, which violated the purchase agreement. 

According to Decrypt, Pleasr has long been negotiating with the album’s producers to adjust said agreement. The collective is reportedly seeking exclusive commercialization rights to the music – while also outlining a plan that would allow the record’s creators to meaningfully profit from – and participate in – the work’s distribution.

These new agreements would ostensibly supersede the original contract that outlawed commercial exploitation for 88 years. (So far, they’ve reportedly negotiated new terms for 16 of the 31 tracks.) That said, they’re not totally ditching the original spirit.

Alongside the lawsuit, Pleasr launched ‘The Album,’ a web portal where folks can mint a $1 token on the Base blockchain in exchange for access to a listening room called “the Chamber, which features a five-minute Shaolin sampler (which sounds great). Minting gets you an auto-generated Wu-Tang name (mine’s Exotic Eternal) and, notably, each purchase shortens the wait time for the album by 88 seconds – one of the cleverer mechanics I’ve seen in a while.

As you can see on the site’s leaderboard, some folks have taken full weeks off the wait time. One person spent $50,000 to remove a month and a half. As of this writing, about 20,000 people have contributed $260,000, but we’re a far cry from the $30 million it’s going to take to bring the album to 2024.

And alongside the other big news of the week, I’m wondering if – based on this sampler and other Wu Tang data – AI won’t just reconstruct Shaolin long before we get access to the original…

Sussudio

In the early 80s, legend says, Phil Collins was playing with a drum machine and improvising lyrics when "su-sussudio" popped out of his mouth and, soon thereafter, into our hearts. “Sussudio” entered our lexicon, rising to the top of the US Billboard charts in 1985.

40 years later, “su sussudio” was the first thing that popped into my head when I heard that all three major labels are suing Suno and Udio – the AI music companies you’ve seen before in the Beat – for mass copyright infringement.

This comes a month after the former raised $125 million, the 11th highest raise in the history of music tech – and a week after it was accused by the Anti Defamation League of enabling racist lyrics.

As Music Business Worldwide (MBW) notes, the lawsuits against Suno and Udio – though being brought to federal courts in different states (Massachusetts and New York, respectively) – contain nearly identical claims: that they “violated the copyrights held by recording companies by copying and ingesting copyrighted music to train their AI.”

Beat readers may remember when I ran my own test, attempting to make Udio emulate the post-Ozzy Black Sabbath frontman, Ronny James Dio, which seemed to make things pretty clear. To fully grok just how blatant the companies’ use of copyrighted material is, watch this sampler of text-based re-creations:

As Rob Abelow wrote: “It's been clear to anyone with ears that Suno & Udio have trained on copyrighted material for their AI models, with zero transparency, plan to compensate, or seek licenses.”

“And there ARE ways to do this & play by the rules,” he continues:

“1. Train only on licensed catalog
2. Compensate artists & songwriters
3. Full transparency

It just takes a little longer & requires actually caring about creatives.”

Coda

From the video above, it may seem like an open-and-shut case, but these companies have some levers to pull – namely fair use arguments and the claim that infringement was “coaxed” by the plaintiffs’ prompts (MBW has a great in-depth breakdown of the case).

Either way, this case stands to be a precedent-setting event, manifesting philosophical debates about how we should reconcile profit-driven AI models with a creativity-stifling copyright regime.

What’s exciting is that the case could find some middle ground. Philosophically, many folks’ main beef with AI is that it affronts our sanctimonious sense of intellectual property – our own individualized creative intelligence. Machines learn from copyrighted information and then use that as the basis of new material. But it’s worth taking one humbling step back to admit that that’s how we work, too.

Take “Sussudio,” which sounds a lot like Prince’s “1999,” a global hit that arrived in 1982. Both critics and Collins have acknowledged the likeness. The Genesis frontman has even admitted to listening to a lot of Prince while on tour. Inevitably, it showed up in his subconscious unannounced. It happens.

Truly, AI isn’t that different from a guy just spitting out nonsense words while playing around with a drum machine. We are all Phil Collins. What sets us apart is the lore – the secret Moroccan vaults and Bill Murray heists and all the other motherfuckin’ ruckus.

Now go outside and listen to music — it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.