Snoop Dogg to Auction Off His Own Memorabilia — Is This a Major New Revenue Opportunity for Artists? (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comJem Aswad Executive Editor, Music It’s no mystery that music memorabilia is a booming business. The Gibson J-160E acoustic guitar on which John Lennon wrote many early Beatles hits went for $2.5 million at an auction.
Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyrics for his iconic 1965 song “Like a Rolling Stone” sold for $2 million. And in the most valuable auction item in hip-hop history — a gold, ruby and diamond crown ring designed and worn by Tupac Shakur — went for over a million last year (to Drake, natch).
The catch? In many if not most such cases, the artist or their estate got nothing: These items ended up in the hands of people who knew how to monetize them, and the profits went to the seller and the auction house, which commonly takes 20-30% of the sale price.
Music superstardom has a lot of ephemera — along with top-value items like the ones above, there are clothes, setlists, scripts, riders, schedules and other items that are either used briefly and discarded, or sit in storage units for years or decades.
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