Pop Icon Takes Gold With New NFT Bullion Coins

80’s Music Legend Rick Astley Launches Back Catalog As NFTs – On Solid Gold Records!

Bullion.Directory Market News 1 April, 2021
By Alison Macdonald
Commercial Editor at Bullion.Directory

As NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) rapidly become mainstream investments it’s starting to seem like there’s nothing that cannot be made into a cryptographic unit and sold to ravenously excited Bitcoin millionaires.

From Crypto Kittys to first tweets, Banksy’s art to doodles by Grimes – if it can be digitized it can be made into an NFT.

According to Wikipedia “A non-fungible token is a unit of data on a digital ledger called a blockchain, where each NFT can represent a unique digital item, and thus they are not interchangeable. NFTs can represent digital files such as art, audio, videos, items in video games and other forms of creative work.”

Although typically shunned by gold bugs, NFTs have recently become an inescapable story across all media channels.

While gold investors take delight in a 5% gain, NFTs have been producing massive profits for early adopters. Even the most ardent physical metals fans have recently admitted to being tempted by these new crypto investments in a new survey.

Tokenized versions of popular memes have been proving incredibly lucrative for early investors with “Overly Attached Girlfriend” changing hands for a staggering $1.8m last month, up from $197 in February, and “Star Wars Kid” pocketing it’s original creator Ghyslain Raza a cool $500,000 at the start of the year.

It was therefore inevitable that at some point someone would combine the worlds of meme, music and physical bullion to produce an NFT so epic that it would capture the hearts of a new demographic outside of Reddit and Twitch – and who better to lead the charge than 80’s heart-throb Rick Astley?

As someone born before the advent of mobile phones and digital formats, Astley (56) was concerned about the ephemeral nature of purely digital investments and insisted that his tokens would ship with a lasting physical representation.

I wanted my music NFTs to be available in a physical format and what better medium than gold? All of my singles went gold so why not recreate these award-winning disks in miniature as solid gold coins?

Framed gold disks have long been a collector’s favorite but up until now these have been made from gold painted plastic, a poor substitute to celebrate something as precious as the gift of music.

Astley approached English bullion producer Baird & Co. last December with his idea for a 1oz gold coin and was able to take his plan from concept to a finished bullion product in record time, despite the pandemic.

Baird’s senior designer Maja Aprilskämt said “Working with Rick was a real pleasure, back home in Sweden his music was a huge part of my life growing up and being able to immortalize his genius in gold has been a dream come true.”

Each coin is made from 1 troy oz of 9999 pure gold, with an enameled replica label inset surrounded by fine circular grooves representing the maestro’s music on the obverse face. The reverse features a pressed QR code leading to the NFT’s location on the blockchain.

Coins are delivered with a corresponding miniature record sleeve, capable of housing the coin, and come in an attractive presentation box hand-crafted in English Oak, taken from a storm-damaged tree on Rick’s Surrey estate.

Although investors are actually buying the NFT – available exclusively on the OpenSea marketplace – the physical coin is included in the price.

There is only one coin available for each of Mr Astley’s top-10 singles, and at time of publishing only 3 were left unsold from their original launch.

Hold Me In Your Arms, Take Me To Your Heart and She Wants To Dance With Me are still available at their original $9999 launch price – but perhaps as proof of Rick’s popularity 2 were already back on OpenSea’s secondary market at a valuation 3000% higher than that paid a week ago.

Rick Astley’s NFTs are available for purchase here.

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