Generally, if there’s a sale of memorabilia related to The Beatles (it’s a British rock group. Ask your grandparents), there’s a huge amount of interest. Well, there’s another one coming. But, since Stuff wouldn’t be paying attention unless it was at least tech-adjacent, you know something’s up.
Julian Lennon, the late John Lennon’s son, has announced an auction of Beatles’ memorabilia on the Yellowheart platform. Only, interested parties aren’t bidding for the physical items. Julian’s keeping those. Instead, they’re bidding on NFTs made using those items.
It’s virtually the Beatles
Up for grabs are NFTs of handwritten notes by Paul McCartney about Hey Jude, as well as three guitars given to Julian by John. There are also two digital versions of clothing items worn by the rock singer, on the Magical Mystery Tour and in the movie Help!
At the moment, the cheapest item is going for $4,000. The largest bid, for Lennon’s hand-written notes, starts at $30,000. That’s nearly R500,000 for a digital reproduction of a physical item (which you can see in the header image above, if you want to save some money). Currently, bids are around $50,000 (R760,000) for the McCartney notes.
Of course, it’s not just digital versions of physical items that are on auction. Julian Lennon is also throwing in another digital file in which he describes a “specific heartfelt memory” about the item in question. Which certainly would make this Beatles action unique. But it’s still not the real deal. As the various entries read, “A NFT is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on the blockchain. Julian Lennon is the sole owner of the physical item.”