A one-off rerecording of Bob Dylan’s hit song Blowin’ in the Wind has sold for almost £1.5m at auction.
The release is the first studio recording of the song since Dylan wrote it in 1962. It was sold by Christie’s in London on Thursday.
The sale, at £1,482,000, exceeded the original price estimated by the auction house, which was set at between £600,000 to £1m.
The recording was made in March 2021 with Dylan’s longtime collaborator T Bone Burnett and featured as part of Christie’s “exceptional sale” during its classic week.
Burnett said he hoped the recording, offered on Ionic Original – a new audio medium, would help “develop a musical space in the fine arts market”.
He said: “I trust and hope it will mean as much to whomever acquired it today at Christie’s exceptional sale as it does to all of us who made it, and that they will consider it and care for it as a painting or any other singular work of art.”
This year marks Dylan’s 60th anniversary as a recording artist and of Blowin’ in the Wind, which was written for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
Peter Klarnet, Christie’s senior specialist in Americana, books and manuscripts, said: “We are so pleased with the excellent result this evening for the Ionic Original disc of Bob Dylan’s first new studio recording of Blowin’ in the Wind since 1962.
“To work with such an incredibly important and groundbreaking advance in analogue playback technology is a tremendous honour. We are excited that this is just the beginning for this amazing new opportunity for recording artists to work with T Bone and NeoFidelity to reset the value of music.”
