Are the Beatles Ready for iTunes?
May 11th, 2006 | By James Lewin | Category: Digital MusicApple, which on May 8 won a trademark dispute with the Beatles over its iTunes music store, wants to get rights to sell the digital version of the band’s songs through the online service.
“We certainly will do everything we can to get them on iTunes,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “The Beatles aren’t available in any digital format today but they are going to be one day. We certainly hope that happens on iTunes.”
Apple Corps Ltd., which is owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and the estate of George Harrison, is remastering the entire Beatles catalog to make the songs available for downloading for the first time, Apple Corps’s managing director Neil Aspinall told a London court last month.”There’s a huge gold mine in the Beatles catalog,” said Russ Crupnick, a music industry analyst at NPD. “There are tens of millions of people who have never bought anything from a digital store, and when they do the tendency is overwhelming to buy it from Apple Computer. When you think about a premier artist like the Beatles, it may drag some of those other people to buy.”
via Bloomberg
