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Rare interviews with The Beatles going up for auction as set of NFTs

“The auction represents the first time ever that NFTs of rock music icon interviews are being offered to the general public.”

The Beatles

Image: Santi Visalli / Getty

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Four rare interviews, one conducted with each member of the Beatles, have been minted into NFTs and are headed to auction today.

The four Non-Fungible Tokens are separate interviews with each of the Beatles, and have been collated and minted by the Voices Of Classic Rock archive. They cover a variety of topics in their respective interviews: John Lennon discusses his songwriting and the Sgt Pepper track A Day In The Life, McCartney talks about his own creative drive and how it relates to the music industry, Ringo Starr talks about an incident when a fan stole and eventually returned a medallion and George Harrison offers an in-depth discussion of Abbey Road studios.

The NFTs, alongside a .wav file of the interviews, each include a portrait of the Beatles member in question. The conversations vary greatly in length: Harrison’s is almost half an hour, while McCartney’s is 45 seconds.

The NFTs have been minted on the Ethereum blockchain, and each starts with a minimum bid of 1.25 Ethereum. That is, at time of writing, roughly equivalent to $4,000. If you don’t fancy paying multiple thousands of dollars for ownership of less than an hour of Beatles content (as appealing as that sounds), you can head to the Voices Of Classic Rock website where the audio and the portraits have been made available for download.

The Voices Of Classic Rock Archive’s managing director, Jonathan Firstenberg, said of the sale: The extensive variety of Beatles interviews that we have in our collection are, perhaps, our most comprehensive and valuable assets. That is why we wanted to launch with John, Paul, George, and Ringo: the ultimate classic rock stars!

“The owners of VOCR acquired this remarkable archive from its creator, Kathleen Wittbold, because they understood that there would always be future growth in the value of audio content for all things related to classic rock music. All of the interviews contained with VOCR are unique, and, like any other important and unique object or artwork, they will continue to grow in rarity and value over time.”

Voices Of Classic Rock makes no mention of the carbon impact of proof-of-work NFTs, as Ethereum-based NFTs are. Estimates on how much CO2 is created when minting and selling a single Ethereum NFT vary, but some place the cost as high as 211 kilograms, the equivalent of driving a petrol-powered car over 500 miles.

Some other NFT marketplaces have attempted to mitigate their impact by purchasing carbon offsets, or by using proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work blockchain technology.

See the auction here. Bidding kicks off at 5 PM GMT / noon EST today (6 December).

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