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."

Comments

Re:Is this that important ?

[PCM2]

OK -- and mind you it's not as if I listen to Beatles records every day or anything -- but for starters it largely depends on what you're listening to.

Most people who talk about the Beatles as "great music" are talking about their later catalog, and I'm certainly among those. My favorite albums are probably Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Abbey Road, and I like some of the stuff in between. I can not listen to songs like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," so I can't defend them.

As for what makes it good music, believe it or not, at the time a lot of it was highly creative and original. Though a lot of the songs are credited Lennon/McCartney, in truth the Beatles were a band in the truest sense, with all four members contributing. (Witness the fact that none of their solo efforts were as good as the Beatles stuff.)

Furthermore, they really were good musicians, as well as songwriters/arrangers. If you walked up to Jimmy Page tomorrow and told him to his face that you think George Harrison was a better guitar player than he is, he might just agree with you.

As far as Beatles fans go, I myself am a "Paul." I think he wrote great melodies and just really nice songs. You can call them pop if you want, but then all of rock n' roll up until probably the mid-90s could just as easily be categorized as pop.

And I don't think you can really discount that there really hadn't been any music that sounded like that before the Beatles came along. In other words, hindsight is golden.

Example: Me, the first new music that was really compelling to me in my teenage years was Suicidal Tendencies, GBH, the Dead Kennedys, and Minor Threat. Then I discovered Metallica and Slayer, and I ran in that direction. Then one day somebody played me a Black Sabbath record from the 1970s. My reaction? It's crap. It sounds like crap, it's too slow, it's not "heavy," the singing is weak and silly. Well, look -- I was wrong. And really not a single one of those bands I mentioned would have come around had it not been for Black Sabbath. I just wasn't experienced enough, I didn't understand music or recording or anything else enough, to properly be able to appreciate what had come before the bands I was familiar with. I'm thinking a lot of the Beatles-haters in this thread are falling victim to some of the same.

Someone else in this thread said that the Beatles lacked anyone with the "power" of a Jim Morrison. Oh really? And John Lennon had no cultural impact, did he? Interesting.

I'm the first to admit that a lot of the Beatles' stuff is commercial -- particularly, I think they get way too much credit for inspiring the psychedelic movement -- but to pretend that they weren't groundbreaking, highly original, highly creative, highly talented musicians just makes a person sound ignorant.

Re:Is this that important ?

[Tyir]

Yes, the Beatles are pretty unpopular with today's youth. Oh, wait, actual data and not random anecdotes:
http://www.last.fm/charts

And I seriously hope no one tries to argue that enough baby boomers are on last.fm to skew the data.

Re:Is this that important ?

[Vectronic]

And only a fraction of Mozart, Beethoven, etc... are still around, or considered timeless...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Ludwig_van_Beethoven

Now tell me if all, or even a quarter of those are well known... hell half of them don't even have a wiki page, which means accorded to the internet masses, they are less relevant than most Beatles songs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Beatles_songs

Ah yeah The Beatles

[Orion Blastar]

I remember my 14 year-old niece. She was wearing a t-shirt that said "The Beatles" as everyone in her school wore them.

I asked her if she ever listened to "The Beatles" and she replied "Who?" and I said "The Beatles, you know like your T-Shirt says." and then she said "What kind of music do they play? Are they rappers or techno or heavy metal?" I said "No, they were Rock and Roll, classic Rock and Roll, like from the 1960's." and she said "What kind of songs did they play?" and I said "Yellow Submarine, Yesterday, A Hard Day's Night, and a few others." she said "They sound silly, are they still alive?" I said "No, two of them are dead." and she said "Then how do they play their music, did they replace the two dead guys yet?" I said "They had like over 200 songs and they are trying to digitze them into new formats." and she said "How can they digitize them when half the band is dead?" and I asked "How could you wear a Beatles logo T-shirt and not know who they are?" and she said "It is a fashion trend at our school, everyone is wearing them because our grandparents used to wear them. You know, Hippies and stuff like that. Retrofashion is so in now."

Ironic that at one time The Beatles claimed they were bigger than Jesus. Now the youth of today hardly even know who they were other than some t-shirt sold in the mall as Retrofashion your grandparents used to wear.