Will iTunes and the Beatles come together?

Author: Brett Thomas
Published: 2nd April 2007
Comments (11) Stumble
Will iTunes and the Beatles come together?

"Come together" - Jobs is joining EMI for some big news - could it be the Beatles on iTunes?

Update: The announcement was actually totally different, but even better than The Beatles - you can now purchase songs from EMI artists for $1.29 with no DRM and double the standard quality. All full albums will remain their normal price but still be double quality and DRM free. The service starts in May (though I wonder how this will work with the new "Complete My Album" feature).

DRM FREEEEEE!!!!

There's no doubt that iTunes has changed the way that people think of buying music, and arguably for the better. Some people have even drawn the correlation that iTunes is for music delivery what the Beatles was for music. Is it true? Probably not, but now you may at least find the Beatles on Apple's service... and today might be the day that Apple and EMI announce it.

Steve Jobs is apparently flying over to do a big press release with the troubled record label, under the auspices of some "very big news." That news has been rumoured to be the biggest thing in music showing up on the biggest thing in legal digital distribution - and that could be really big for both sides.

The Beatles have arguably the largest legacy in modern music, but that doesn't mean that the catalogue has been keeping EMI in the black. In fact, the recording label has been getting into more and more financial trouble, particularly in more recent years. Hopefully a release of The Beatles to a new generation of digital-based music buyers will bring some much-needed cash to the company.

Of course, on the other side of the coin, Apple won't exactly be going broke either. The addition would be the first re-release of The Beatles catalogue since the Anthology, and that would be a big, exclusive feather in the cap of iTunes. The press event will include live performances from unknown artists, so it should be quite a show.

Do you have a thought on the news? Tell us about it in our forums.
Quote Fod 2nd April 2007, 13:38
nope, much bigger.
Quote:
Apple has announced that iTunes will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied. Complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price.

all together now:

**** YEAH!!!

everyone go quickly and buy a bunch of these DRM free tracks! we'll send the loudest message to the record labels yet!

edit: oh it's starting in May. oh well. well, everyone go and buy a bunch of those DRM free songs in may!!
Quote Da Dego 2nd April 2007, 13:56
WOW!!!!! That was better than the beatles :)
Quote Atomic 2nd April 2007, 14:10
It is a step in the right direction, might help in the (french?) legal battles about the unfair competition?

Nice song reference in the title too ;)
Quote quack 2nd April 2007, 14:14
DRM-free music via iTunes. Great news!!
Quote Flibster 2nd April 2007, 14:55
Double the sound quality....

So they're also implying that normal itunes purchases sound crap then? *not that I'm disagreeing there*

Higher bitrate is good. Can we have some proper lossless songs soon? FLAC would be great.

*strokes his Cowon iAudio A2 and M3*

Simon/~Flibster
Quote Firehed 2nd April 2007, 15:22
See my comments in the thread in SD about the DRM-free bit. But what's the big deal with The Beatles on iTunes? It's not like you can't just buy the damn CD. Or an old cassette. Or an even older LP *glances at _dom* People have managed to use iTunes to rip all their other music... why not Sgt. Pepper?
Quote customh 2nd April 2007, 15:50
Why a higher price? That ought to drive people away... I'm happy they are offering DRM free, but a higher price isn't gonna get [us] pirates paying...
Quote DreamTheEndless 2nd April 2007, 16:40
Quote:
Originally Posted by customh
Why a higher price? That ought to drive people away... I'm happy they are offering DRM free, but a higher price isn't gonna get [us] pirates paying...

Well, it doubles the hard drive capacity needed (triples really, because they have 1 copy at 2x the size and another copy at 1x the size,) and it increases the bandwidth requirements.

In addition to that, it's good for companies to be able to offer products to different segments of the market. Look at the Celeron for instance - when the celeron was first introduced, it was a way to sell chips that didn't test out at full speed or chips that had failures in the cache. They just disabled half the cache and underclocked them. The problem was of course that they sold far more celerons than they produced through bad production. What did they do about this? Simple - They took perfectly good pentium 3s (and later pentium 4s,) burned out half the cache, underclocked them, and sold them at a lower price as celerons. Why? Because there was a segment of the market that wanted to buy low-end chips and intel needed to have a product for that market segment.
Quote customh 2nd April 2007, 18:53
ok..... I guess
Quote rupbert 2nd April 2007, 20:33
If they were available for 50p they would sell 100x the amount.
Quote Vash-HT 3rd April 2007, 20:58
I agree that the price is too high. I would muchr ather go through the hassle of buying CD's and ripping .wav files to my PC than dling worse quality tracks for about the same I would pay per track on a cd.
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