Article Category: News | Article Tags: george harrison, iTunes, john lennon, mp3s, music, Paul mccartney, ringo star, the Beatles
“You never give me your money, you always give me your funny paper, and in the middle of negotiations, we break down.” This morning, this Abbey Road lyric seems to no longer be something Paul and Ringo have to worry about.
It has definitely been an interesting ride the last few years of iTunes existence. The Beatles are arguably one of the most famous bands that has ever existed, and iTunes, the music vendor who makes billions in sales, has always wanted a piece of them. But for one reason over another, the negotiations always failed.
The Beatles are finally available on iTunes
The Product: Every Beatles Song, Ever, for $150
This is a pretty astounding price tag for this kind of product. The band has a LOT of records. Each album has many hit songs. And I’m assuming this includes all of those rough sessions tapes as well in which the band is doodling around on their instruments, half playing songs. I believe much of this was on their Beatles anthology.
But I digress. Its a good thing they’ve made it iTunes.
Reason 1: All the kids out there who have no idea what good music sounds like, or who, more specifically, don’t know (or don’t think they know) any Beatles songs, will finally get exposed to them, which will probably shift the view of youthful songwriters for a short term period starting now.
Reason 2: Everybody involved is going to make a lot of money. Not that they need it or anything, but I expect the Beatles to start selling music and earning money in the ranks of Michael Jackson’s postmortem record sales.
Reason 3: Its really lame to have to steal mp3s of a band that you really like. And unfortunately, because iTunes has somewhat set the bar for lawful mp3 downloads, people who search first on iTunes and don’t see anything will usually start searching through BitTorrents for the goods. Its a sad reality. But what about this whole BitTorrent thing — are there other reasons why users download illegally?
Its not about legality, its about ease of use
Another famous British rock band recently released a new record. Instead of selling it and distributing it through their record label, Radiohead did it on their own. They put the record up on their website for download for free. Guess what, people still downloaded it illegally (by “illegally” I mean, they used BitTorrent).
This became an interesting set of data for a de facto social study. Even when presented with free material, web users still preferred to download via the non-lawful method simply because of download speeds.
I don’t think this is the case for most people however, and for those who really could care less about speed, they can finally go buy a album worth of mp3s.
Sales Prediction: 500 million dollars in 1 year
That’s right. I think the Beatles alone will sell $500 million worth of mp3s this year on iTunes. We’ll see!
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