Slashdot Mirror
Attempt To "Digitalize" Beatles Goes Sour
An anonymous reader points to this article at exclaim.ca, which begins "Just when Beatles fans thought the band were finally going digital, the Norwegian national broadcaster has been forced to call off the deal. Broadcasting company NRK has had to remove a series of 212 podcasts, each of which featured a different Beatles song and would have effectively allowed fans to legally download the entire Fab Four catalogue for free."
Am I the only one that's incredibly annoyed by the fact that people seem to have forgotten that CD's ARE DIGITAL?!?!? I know what they mean is digital distribution, but nobody says that. They say things like, "the Beatles are resisting going digital", or "The Beatles are finally going digital with Rock Band", or whatever...You can already listen to the Beatles in digital form. You've been able to listen to the Beatles in digital form for 30 years...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Why use the word "digitalize", they have CD's, pretty sure those aren't recorded in analog.
Oh, and I'm sure all the die-hard Beatles fans have complete discographies in "digital" as it is and wouldn't really care about a new way of downloading it.
I think Linux isn't better than Windows hence in the slashdot realm I'm a troll
Given Paul McCartney has left his major label, explicitly calling them out as out-of-touch with the current digital reality, I'd say he's less than terrified by technology.
Nonsense. People always over-glorify that one period of music. Do you really think that the only great musicians in all of human history were born in a span of a hundred years?
The modern youth you describe remember Frank Sinatra and the Beatles just as well as they do Mozart and Bach. Which is to say, vaguely. No music remains truly popular forever. Your definition of timeless as "lasting until the end of civilization" is overly strict. Nothing could meet such a standard, or, if something could, there would be no way for us to know it.
Music can be fairly described as timeless so long as some people in the modern day, who were not around when the music first became popular, still enjoy it. I think the Beatles can easily meet that criterion.
The only ones hurt by the Beatles not being on iTunes and other services are the remaining members.
I don't think they're going to be hurt.
The Beatles have the biggest selling back catalogue in the world. The #2 seller AC DC are also not on iTunes.
Both bands think they make more money selling Albums than singles & selling singles on iTunes would cannibalise their album sales.
Not sure if I agree or not, but they've certainly got numbers (huge album sales) on their side.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
In terms of sonic complexity, the Beatles are more interesting from a musical standpoint than Mozart. He was just an expert tunesmith with the ability to set melodies in symphonic structure. Some of the music the Beatles made, particularly around the Sergeant Pepper/White Album period, compares well with Mahler or Philip Glass. It still forms the basis of the popular music that most people listen to today, so just as blues fans will always tend to work their way back to Robert Johnson and his ilk, so most musicians today will acknowledge their debt to the Beatles. Certainly all of the working musicians I know, in various fields, are all Beatles fans and none are quite as ready to dismiss them as some people in this thread are.
[FUCK BETA]
I agree with you completely. I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out that Pythagoras was an idiot. After all, we currently have below average high school students doing more complex mathematics than he ever did.
The quote "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants" isn't only applicable to sciences.