Single physical edition of new recording sells for more than estimated

Bob Dylan’s first new studio recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind” since 1962 has sold for more than $1.7 million at Christie’s in London. The newly recorded track was from a special session with multi-Grammy winning producer T Bone Burnett on Burnett’s newly announced groundbreaking Ionic Original disc. The only physical copy sold for more than it’s $600,000-$1 million estimate during auction on July 7th.

“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,” shares Peter Klarnet, Christie’s Senior Specialist, Americana, Books and Manuscripts.
“To work with such an incredibly important and groundbreaking advance in analogue playback technology is a tremendous honor. 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.”

“Marshall McLuhan said that a medium surrounds a previous medium and turns the previous medium into an art form, as film did with novels, as television did with film, as the internet has done with television, and as digital has done with analogue,” Burnett adds. “With Bob Dylan’s new version of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind,’ our first Ionic Original archival analogue disc, we have entered and aim to help develop a music space in the fine arts market. 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 Ionic Original disc is the first recording to utilize the patented technology of a CD/vinyl hybrid from Burnett’s company, NeoFidelity, Inc. The auction of this unique lot – in Bob Dylan’s 60th anniversary year as a recording artist – marks a first in music history: the new recording of Bob Dylan’s seminal song is a landmark moment and Burnett noted at the time the sale was first announced that the technology used to create the Ionic Original disc “advances the art of recorded sound and marks the first breakthrough in analog sound reproduction in more than 70 years, achieving dramatic improvements in listening experience and durability.”

Debuted on the diminutive stage of Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village in April 1962, “Blowin’ in the Wind” was an instant classic, and is today woven firmly into the fabric of American culture.

Dylan first recorded the song for Columbia on July 9, 1962 for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. He entered the studio again in 2021 to re-record the song with his friend Burnett to release the only single copy of the new recording.

The cultural impact of the song cannot be overstated. Covered by hundreds of artists since the words and music first appeared in print in May 1962, the song not only brought Bob Dylan to the world stage, it gave new voice to the burgeoning social movements of the 1960s.