NEW YORK (AP) – Forty years after it was made, the Velvet Underground’s first recording – purchased for pennies at a Manhattan flea market – became a financial success in cyberspace.

Selling price: $155,401, on eBay.

That was the closing bid posted online for the rare recording of music that eventually ended up on the influential New York band’s first album, “The Velvet Underground & Nico.”

The record belongs to Warren Hill, a collector from Montreal who discovered the 12-inch, acetate LP four years ago at a flea market in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

He paid 75 cents.

The recording turned out to be an in-studio acetate made during Velvet Underground’s first recording over four days in April 1966 at New York’s Scepter Studios. The record reportedly is only one of two in existence; the other is privately owned, with rumors circulating around the world about who the owner is.

The studio recording – considered lost – is the first version of an LP that the artist Andy Warhol shopped to Columbia Records as a ready-to-release debut album by his protege band, according to an article written by Eric Isaacson of Mississippi Records in Portland, Ore. that appears in the current issue of Goldmine Magazine.

Isaacson helped Hill decipher the nature of his lucky find.

“We cued it up and were stunned – the first song was not ‘Sunday Morning’ as on the ‘Velvet Underground & Nico’ Verve LP, but rather it was ‘European Son’ – the song that is last on that LP, and it was a version neither of us had ever heard before!” writes Isaacson. “It was less bombastic and more bluesy than the released version, and it clocked in at a full two minutes longer. I immediately took the needle off the record, and realized that we had something special.”

Columbia had rejected the album, but Velvet Underground went on to worldwide success, leaving its musical stamp on hundreds of other bands. Their first album had a cover designed by Warhol of a banana, with “Peel Slowly and See” printed near a tab that lifted to expose the pink, phallic fruit.

The band, named after a book about edgy sex practices in the 1960s, was fueled by Moe Tucker’s hard-driving drumming, John Cale’s anxious viola, and lead singer Lou Reed, whose lyrics spoke of drug-induced beauty and gritty Lower East Side realities.

The first album features Nico, the European model-actress-singer in a first and last recorded appearance with the band.

How the studio LP got to the flea market is a mystery.

But once Hill and Isaacson discovered what they had, they photographed the album and made a digital backup copy of the music.

They also decided to put it up for auction through Saturn Records, of Oakland, Calif., which represented Hill for the 10-day eBay auction that began Nov. 28, with first online bids blazing to $20,000.

By Friday night, the last hours of the auction, the recording was at the center of a flurry of furious bidding on the Web site.

Saturn, which specializes in vintage vinyl recordings, did not immediately return a phone call on Saturday.

So there’s now another mystery linked to the LP: Who bought it?

On eBay, the buyer is identified only by the screen name “mechadaddy.”