NEW YORK, NY.- Ten years ago, the most mysterious and expensive album of all time was announced by the Wu-Tang Clan as a protest against the devaluation of creativity in the age of the internet. “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” limited to one hyperdeluxe physical copy, was bought for a reported $2 million by the “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli and later acquired by an online art collective for $4 million.

Now it can be yours for a dollar. Sort of.

Pleasr, the online collective, began selling access to “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” on Thursday, charging fans $1 (plus fees) to be part of what it called an experiment to test a simple question: “Do people still value music in a digital era?” As befitting an album that has been wrapped in legal and public controversy for a decade, however, the transaction is anything but simple.

For $1, fans will gain access to an encrypted digital version of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.” But only a five-minute sampler of the album will be available now, Pleasr says.

The Wu-Tang Clan’s original sale contract with Shkreli in 2015 said that “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” could not be released to the public for 88 years — until Oct. 8, 2103 — although the agreement allowed for private viewings and listening sessions.

For each $1 that Pleasr takes in, the group says it will reduce the waiting period for the full album’s release by 88 seconds. By a rough calculation, it would take about 28 million contributions of $1 apiece to eliminate that delay entirely.

In an announcement, Pleasr said that it had been “secretly working with the original artists and producer” to release the album, and that proceeds from these sales would be shared with the Wu-Tang Clan and the album’s producers: RZA, the group’s mastermind, and Cilvaringz, who worked with RZA on the project.

A spokesperson for RZA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” was created as a unique physical object, deliberately cloaked in the grandeur of an artistic relic. The album’s two CDs were ensconced in an engraved nickel-silver box and accompanied by a leather-bound book with 174 parchment pages.

The project stirred strong reactions: that it was a principled stance against the race-to-the-bottom economics of digital music; that it was crass capitalism; that its only true legacy was to deprive the Wu-Tang Clan’s fans of music. The condemnations only intensified when Shkreli — who once raised the price of a drug by 5,000% overnight — was revealed as the winner of an auction.

Pleasr, also known as PleasrDAO, has also portrayed “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” as a kind of precursor of NFTs, recapturing the value of artistic scarcity in a digital age. The group, a “decentralized autonomous organization,” has been on the frontier of digital art, acquiring items like an NFT related to the image of a dog that inspired the “doge” meme of the 2010s.

“It’s always our intention,” Camilla McFarland, a member of the collective, said in a group interview Thursday, “to take these original works of art and figure out a way, in honoring the original vision of the artist, to get it into the hands of the people.”

Since Pleasr acquired the album in 2021 from the federal government — which had seized it from Shkreli after he was convicted of securities fraud — the group has been trying to find ways to share it with the public. This month the album will be displayed at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, off the southern coast of Australia. Last weekend Pleasr hosted private listening sessions in New York.

But the Wu-Tang album has brought in the additional complexity of music rights, which now also involves a lawsuit against Shkreli. This week, Pleasr sued Shkreli, saying that, after he had relinquished ownership of the album, he livestreamed parts of it, apparently from copies, in violation of the sale contract. (Shkreli, who was released from prison in 2022, said on social media that Pleasr “will easily lose” the case.)

The lawsuit made public the original sale contract, with minimal redactions. That document makes clear that RZA and Cilvaringz sold only 50% of their recording and composition rights; keeping half apparently gave them a mechanism to enforce the terms of the deal. In its complaint, Pleasr said that in addition to the $4 million it spent on the album, it has paid another $750,000 for the copyrights to the recordings.

But there seem to be additional rights that Pleasr must navigate before fully releasing the album. Those may well include clearance licenses for samples.

In an interview, members of Pleasr gingerly avoided specifics but acknowledged that music rights have been a thicket to untangle. They said what they are doing is “fully compliant with the artist agreement and rights holders.”

“We’re a digital and physical museum,” said Matthew Matkov, another Pleasr member. “And it has acquired a very high-level cultural artifact. That artifact is very complicated and has a series of rights and responsibilities.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.