Following the success of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, Wu Tang Clan’s revolutionary singular copy album that toured galleries, museums and festivals around the world (causing such a stir that fans created a Kickstarter fund hoping to raise $5m so they could share it online), the group have decided to release their 20th anniversary album as a portable speaker.

For A Better Tomorrow, RZA partnered with Boombotix, forgoing the traditional model of music distribution, embedding eight songs from the album directly into limited edition Boombotix speakers and releasing 3,000 units before the general album release date.

“To me there’s something transcendent about being able to physically hold music”, says RZA on the Boombotix website. “With this project I hope to strengthen the bond between fan and artist.”

A number of artists are responding to a gap in the physical music market. We’ve seen an emergence of devices that simultaneously blend the tangibility and appeal of physical objects with the practicability and convenience we’ve grown accustomed to thanks to our digital possessions. Musician and sound designer Benjamin Wynn, aka Deru, followed in the footsteps of Wu-Tang Clan by releasing his latest album, 1979, in the form of a limited-edition artefact called The Obverse Box.