Loading ...
Fox News is reporting that the Beatles catalog, one of the last digital holdouts, will be available online soon, but Apple Corps head Neil Aspinall let it drop that any scuttlebutt about the reissues being an iTunes exclusive is incorrect:
But now Aspinall says that when the Beatles songs do get put on the Internet officially, “it will be on all the services, not just one.” So all the Beatles songs will be found on iTunes, Rhapsody, etc. That’s very “PC” of him!
Actually, iTunes is cross-platform, and … oh, right. This report’s on foxnews.com, where every writer is contractually obligated to haul out the years-old “political correctness” joke once every three months. Anyway, we’re sure this agnosticism is being adapted in part because EMI can’t afford to turn away any potential customers; we can’t help but wonder, though, if these 13 rereleases will also serve as EMI’s MP3 guinea pigs. Sure, it would be a huge gamble, but it would also serve as a test of users’ willingness to pay for unprotected copies of songs they already have an affection for–and might be able to easily get for free, if they look in the right places.
Beatles Ready for Legal Downloading Soon [Fox News, via Coolfer]
I’d love for you guys to be right, but I have my doubts. Convincing Aspinall, McCartney/Ono, et al. to go digital (and dis-aggregate their precious albums) in the first place – and then convincing them to release the stuff without DRM? Sounds like a fantasy to me.
Also, I wouldn’t be that thrilled about MP3. If, as is reported, all the Fabs’ albums are finally (finally!) being remastered for the first time since the ‘87 CDs, wouldn’t you want to put them out in some kind of high-bitrate, borderline-lossless format?
Ah, who am I kidding? I’ll probably just wait for rereleased CDs anyway and buy plastic yet again. (Yes, I am that big a tool.)
I assume when people say “mp3″ they mean it would also be available as “flac” for those who want it.
i’d still rather buy a physical CD then download iTune’s DRM’ed crap, burn it, and rip it back to mp3. Their system is nonsense.