Why Did Wu-Tang’s RZA just subscribe to This Bluetooth Speaker firm?

it’s 10:30 p.m. when Mustafa Shaikh‘s telephone rings. it’s RZA. it’s no longer every night that the founding chief of the Wu Tang Clan calls his cell, so he picks up. Shaikh, the VP of marketing at transportable speaker company Boombotix, is in for an earful. “I bought some concepts,” RZA says.

The timing is not always so unusual, however these kinds of calls are hobbies now that RZA has joined Boombotix. prior this month, RZA officially signed on with the San Francisco-based startup, giving him an fairness stake in the firm and a hand in creating its line of rugged wi-fi audio system. As “chief abbott”—a company title that borrows from considered one of his many Wu-Tang nicknames and mashes it up with the cavalier semantics of Silicon Valley org charts—RZA is all in favour of product development and content material strategy, among different issues.

“I discovered their speaker through some mutual pals,” says RZA. “It used to be a loud field. It had a really perfect sound to it. Having an progressive thoughts myself, i believed it can be extra pragmatic now not just as a speaker to play different music, however maybe there’s a solution to put your track within the speaker.”

After firstly attaining out to RZA to license the workforce’s iconic “W” brand for a speaker, Shaikh and Boombotix CEO Lief Storer had been stunned to examine that RZA had a lot bigger ideas. “I put the phone on mute and mentioned, ‘Holy shit. can we do this?'” Shaikh says. “After a few weeks, we figured out that lets do it and still liberate the product in this autumn.”

the end result used to be the Wu Tang Boombot REX, a Wu-branded Bluetooth speaker released by way of Boombotix last November. in addition to serving as a wireless, wearable speaker that connects with good gadgets, this limited-adaptation speaker would come preloaded with tracks from the Wu-Tang Clan’s newest album, a better the next day, a few weeks before its respectable release date.

With physical album sales tanking and the uncertain economics of the all-you-can-move tune services and products, some artists really feel compelled to experiment with new distribution fashions. ultimate 12 months, Wu-Tang famously introduced that its ultimate album, as soon as Upon a Time in Shaolin, would simplest be on hand in a single reproduction, which might be auctioned off for hundreds of thousands of bucks. With the previous channels obliterated, why not scan? Why no longer liberate an album embedded directly right into a speaker? “i think which is a great way to release tune this present day,” says RZA.

The workforce at Boombotix agreed. After their Wu-Tang speaker began flying off the shelves of skate shops, T-shirt stores, and different shops now not historically associated with promoting music, the one-off partnership with RZA started to morph into one thing extra formal.

“We had this synergy,” RZA says. “After a few conferences and hangings and some drinkings, it was once like, yo, let’s get involved. Let me join your staff so that I could sign up for my ideas with it. We agreed and located that balance.”

With that, the Boombotix staff labored out a care for RZA, giving him a title and equity within the company. After months of negotiations, the deal was once officially signed in early 2015 and sent to the corporate’s board for eventual approval. via then, the late-evening brainstorming phone calls from RZA had been already underway.

“i’m satisfied we obtained that conversation,” says RZA. “it is like, shit, I gotta get this to you presently. He all the time takes my call.”

celebrity partnerships with consumer audio electronics companies have been all of the rage considering the fact that Beats teamed up with Dr. Dre virtually 10 years in the past. And given that Beats cashed out with Apple for $3 billion in 2014, the telephone calls from artist reps to firms like Boombotix have handiest increased. but most of these deals come within the type of deals that slap an artist’s identify onto a product, possibly going as far as to rent them them as “brand ambassadors” whose chief accountability is solely using the product publicly.

As chief abbott of Boombotix, RZA’s role is a bit more palms-on than partnerships like Bang & Olufsen’s headphones cobranding deal with DJ Khaled or Ludacris’s now-defunct branding partnership with Soul Electronics (Ludacris’s reps reportedly reached out to Boombotix about putting a an identical deal).

because the creative mastermind and producer behind probably the most a hit groups in hip-hop historical past, RZA is not any stranger to gadgets, which he says have a way of piling up in his home. “When it comes all the way down to it, he is a reasonably large tech geek,” says Shaikh.

“Being a guy that’s into electronics, I felt like i found a bunch of folks that I may be at liberty to express my concepts,” says RZA. “digital improvements. Making one factor do other things. adding performance. i’m chuffed to be with a company that lets me spitball concepts. on occasion they go, ‘well which is kinda loopy, but lets are trying it.'”

The success of the Wu Tang speaker has led RZA and the Boombotix workforce to discover different exclusive, speaker-embedded tune releases. A Grateful lifeless-branded speaker loaded with unreleased song will go on sale in mid-June. in the fall, Boombotix will release a speaker bearing the likeness and sounds of Ol’ soiled Bastard, the late Wu Tang Clan member who was additionally RZA’s cousin. any other upcoming product, about which the Boombotix team is tight-lipped, entails a long-rumored musical collaboration between RZA and another artist.

“For genuine enthusiasts, that is exclusive,” RZA says. “it can be one thing that you can dangle, really feel, contact, and put in your pocket.”

the focal point on unique song content material is not distinctive to Boombotix. this is increasingly more how song-targeted corporations are competing with one some other, especially within the streaming space. After Taylor Swift threw down the gauntlet via casting off her catalog from Spotify, now we have seen Jay Z try to trap listeners to his new streaming provider, Tidal, the usage of exclusive tracks from fashionable artists as bait. Apple is reportedly angling for the same technique as it prepares to relaunch Beats track beneath the venerable iTunes brand.

whereas Boombotix doesn’t see its version as being as transformative as streaming, the corporate does wish to offer artists supplementary the right way to release, market, and take advantage of their song. These partnerships, which Shaikh tells me are negotiated on a per-artist basis, are only one extra earnings supply an artist can tack onto its stability sheet in the technology of streaming and its tricky economics.

along with helping forge artist partnerships—one thing RZA’s industry connections go away him well-positioned to do—he is also concerned about product construction, a job that lets his system geek side shine. of their weekly calls, RZA often proposes concepts that may carry new functionality to the corporate’s merchandise. (Some are better obtained than others.)

At one point, RZA proposed having a speaker double as a tape measure, giving it a dual utility for building employees. “it is like MacGyver,” says RZA. “Now think about, the entire surprising, the individuals who work in that trade have something which is cool, usable, and multifunctional. i don’t assume they’re gonna do that, but maybe, yo! Put an 8-footer in there!”

With concepts like this, RZA is aiming to extend the personalization of Boombotix with which it is already experimenting. On the company’s construct-a-Bot site, users can custom-design their very own speakers with unique color schemes, and even print their own imagery on the entrance grille.

greater than slapping a celebrity’s title on a product, the Boombotix partnership with RZA is an extended-term, fingers-on deal. For RZA, it’s an extra ingenious outlet, and person who lets him tap into the entrepreneurial instinct he’s had his complete existence. As a kid, RZA tells me, he bought newspapers on the Verrazano Bridge and bought socks in bulk to promote them at a profit in Harlem. on the age of thirteen, RZA teamed up with Ol’ dirty Bastard to operate a fruit stand in downtown Brooklyn.

“i am from the big apple, and in tricky times, you gotta go in the market and work,” RZA says. “We was in downtown Brooklyn at Jay boulevard. we’d rise up at six within the morning and set up the fruit stand. i feel I made profit of about $eighty every week. That allowed me to get a pair of sneakers that my mom could not manage to pay for, or get a pair of Lee denims.”

because forming the ten-piece Wu Tang Clan in 1992, RZA and his pals have turned some of the successful hip-hop groups in historical past into a small trade empire, syndicating its tune and individuals’ likenesses into video games and making tens of millions from the sale of its Wu wear line of garb.

“i am no longer afraid to try a trade,” RZA says. “you wish to have Wu Donuts? How so much? All right, let’s are attempting it. but let’s change the glaze on that shit.”