Beatles holding ticket to ride MP3 boom

Signaling an end to the highest-profile holdout in the booming digital music arena, The Beatles are coming to the Internet. The band's business arm, Apple Corps, has confirmed plans to digitally remaster The Beatles' hit-filled catalog and then sell the songs individually online.Signaling an end to the highest-profile holdout in the booming digital music arena, The Beatles are coming to the Internet. The band's business arm, Apple Corps, has confirmed plans to digitally remaster The Beatles' hit-filled catalog and then sell the songs individually online. But don't get out your wallet just yet. The Beatles' work won't be available anytime soon, nor has it been decided which online stores will stock the tunes. The group's intentions were made public this week in written testimony by Apple Corps' managing director, in the firm's trademark lawsuit against Apple Computer. In a statement to the High Court in London, Neil Aspinall acknowledged that Hey Jude, Yesterday, Can't Buy Me Love and the like would, for the first time, be sold in digitally downloadable form upon completion of the remastering project. "I think it would be wrong to offer downloads of the old masters when I am making new masters," Aspinall wrote. "It would be better to wait and try to do them both simultaneously so that you then get publicity of the new masters and the downloading, rather than just doing it ad hoc." "This is not imminent," Apple Corps spokeswoman Elizabeth Freund said. "The only thing we're prepared to say is that we are indeed working on the masters. Where they'll end up, or when, I don't have that information." There were also hints in Aspinall's statement, although no explicitconfirmation, that the remastering will result in new CD versions of The Beatles' albums. "We're remastering the whole Beatles catalog just to make it sound brighter and better, and getting proper booklets to go with each of the packages," he said. After years of foot-dragging along the sidelines of the digital frontier - an unsurprising move for a band that waited until the mid-1980s to convert its catalog to the CD format - The Beatles are shuffling into the online music market during a period of explosive growth. With iPods and other MP3 players now outselling CD players, sales of downloaded songs are booming accordingly: Though US sales of full-length albums were down 7.2 percent last year, the digital singles market grew by 150 percent, with 352.7 million individual songs sold online, according to Nielsen SoundScan. There are some superstar holdouts such as Led Zeppelin, Metallica and Radiohead, but in recent months multiple big-name acts, including Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, have agreed to sell their full catalogs online. Most recently, the Dave Matthews Band announced a deal with Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store. None of them, however, can match the enormous, enduring popularity of The Beatles, whose entry into the digital sector "removes any shadow of a doubt that digital distribution is going mainstream," said Phil Leigh of market research firm Inside Digital Media. Said Isaac Josephson, an analyst with the NPD Group: "Digital music is all about breadth and depth of content, which means back catalog is going to play an extremely significant role. And you can't have a conversation about back catalog without putting The Beatles at the top of the mix... This is a big win for consumers and for the digital music industry." Then again, said Craig Marks, editor of the music magazine Blender: "I don't think this strikes a great victory for the online music world. I think the online music world has already kind of won." There's no telling exactly, or even approximately, how much digital business The Beatles might do, analysts said - particularly given that the band's music has long been informally available through illegal online file-sharing networks: The Beatles were the fifth most downloaded artists last year, according to NPD Group research. But with some of the most popular songs in the history of recorded music, the band would certainly seem poised to succeed in the singles-driven digital realm, where consumers tend to show an affinity for familiar touchstones. "The Fab Four have always been among the most popular bands online even though they're technically - or legitimately - unavailable online," said Eric Garland, chief executive of the Internet measurement company BigChampagne. "My easy prediction is that The Beatles will sell a lot of songs online, even though seemingly everybody who has access to them has their songs already," Garland said. The decision to finally go digital was apparently made by the two surviving Beatles, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, along with Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison. Freund, the Apple Corps spokeswoman, declined to elaborate. The Washington Post
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=18&art_id=16657&sid=7518727&con_type=1