Harry Styles-Signed Guitar Sells for $19,200 Right Before the Grammy Awards
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A Harry Styles-signed electric guitar sold for US$19,200 on Sunday in Los Angeles, hours before his surprise album of the year win at the Grammy Awards.
The 2022 black Fender Player Series Stratocaster electric guitar was inscribed by Styles with the words “Always love” beside a doodle of heart in a gold marker. Styles’ album Harry’s House defeated Beyoncé’s Renaissance and eight other nominees to win the album of the year at music’s most prestigious awards show on Sunday night.
The guitar was valued between US$2,000 and US$4,000, prior to the auction.
The instrument was among 50 items owned or signed by the music’s biggest stars that were auctioned by Julien’s Auctions over the weekend to raise funds for MusiCares, which supports the health and welfare of members of the music community.
The auction house, which was expecting to raise between US$200,000 and US$400,000 from this sale, said the sale realised more than US$500,000. Many items sold multiple times their pre-sale estimates.
“This year’s edition was one of our best and most successful auctions to date,” according to Martin Nolan, executive director of Julien’s Auctions.
The top-selling lot was a pair of white Nike Air Max sneakers owned, worn, and signed by Eminem, which sold for US$40,625, which was 20 times its presale estimate. The sneakers were sold to Margaritavillain, an anonymous rapper who’s often compared to Banksy of the contemporary art world. His fans raised money through a GoFundMe page to help him successfully bid and win the shoes, according to Julien’s.
An ensemble worn by J-Hope of South Korean boy band BTS, including a black utility-style jumpsuit, a buckle belt, a black cotton T-shirt, and a black ribbed bunny ear beanie, attracted 22 bids and sold for US$21,875, more than 10 times its original estimate of US$2,000.
Additionally, a 2020 Epiphone DR-100EB acoustic guitar signed by Taylor Swift fetched US$25,000, five times its original estimate. The guitar features custom graphics from Swift’s Grammy-nominated album evenmore.
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The federal budget has rattled property investors. But the biggest mistake isn’t the tax changes, it’s the conclusion many are drawing from them.
2 min
The recent budget has forced a reckoning for property investors.
Negative gearing now restricted to new residential builds, the CGT discount gone and on paper, the numbers look different.
And many investors are responding by pivoting toward yield, prioritising cash flow over capital growth in a way that property strategists say misses the point entirely.
“The debate has shifted to yield versus growth as if they are opposing forces,” says Abdullah Nouh, founder of Melbourne-based buyers’ agency Mecca Property Group. “But that framing is itself the mistake.”
Nouh, who works with high-net-worth families and investors on long-term acquisition strategy, argues that capital growth remains the primary driver of genuine wealth creation and that the post-budget environment has made quality assets more important, not less.
The numbers make his case plainly. An additional $500 per week in rental income is welcome. A prestige asset appreciating by $1 million over a market cycle is transformative.
These are not equivalent outcomes, and portfolios built around yield at the expense of location and land value tend to generate income while wealth stands largely still.
The more nuanced shift Nouh is seeing among sophisticated investors is a move toward assets where both outcomes can be engineered simultaneously – established homes on substantial land in quality locations, where the existing dwelling can be repositioned, rental returns improved, and the underlying land value compounds independent of what sits on it.
For investors with existing equity, commercial property is also entering the conversation in a more serious way.
Prestige industrial assets, medical centres and long-leased essential retail offer income profiles that residential property in most capital city markets cannot currently match: longer lease terms, tenants covering outgoings, and greater predictability than the residential tenancy cycle.
“The investors who build lasting wealth are rarely the ones who chased yield or growth exclusively,” says Nouh.
“They are the ones who built a strategy they could sustain – one that generated enough income to hold quality assets through multiple cycles while those assets compounded in value.”
The budget has changed the settings. It has not changed the fundamentals.
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