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."
Recently, Paul McCartney said negotiations to get the Fab Four onto iTunes had âoestalled,â leaving some fans more than a little ticked that they still have to listen to the band the old-fashioned way.
What's "the old-fashioned way"? Bit-Torrent?
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
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
Like Flock of Seagulls!
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
The Beatles aren't on iTunes because Apple is pissed at Apple. I was also under the impression that under British law, early Beatles recordings are about to become public domain so there is this sudden urgency to create and sell Beatles music online in some format.
And if I'm not mistaken, there is a Beatles Rock Band game coming out next Christmas.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
Look, nobody calls book publishing "Alpha/numeric character distribution".
Am I wrong for naming content by its content (MIME) type? My mother asked if I would send her pictures of my vacation, and I told her "yep, I'll have those image/jpegs to you in a multipart/mixed by saturday", then she called me a human/x-weirdo and I modem/NO-CARRIER'd her! We haven't spoken since, but at first I thought you were her posting AC before I noticed your improper labeling of publish/multichar so you couldn't possibly be her. Besides, a human/female on http://slashdot.org./article.pl? No way!
I'm 47 .... I live in Chicago...
Hi Barak you really should register rather than posting as AC.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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
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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
"Vår daglige Beatles" (Our daily Beatles) was a daily radio program presenting all 212 recordings by The Beatles in chronological order, presented by Bård Ose and Finn Tokvam. Every presentation lasted about five minutes and contained interesting facts about the song -- what the inspiration for the song was, how it was recorded, some trivia about the period it was recorded, and so on. A very well-produced and informative work. The radio show started January 2007, and every Beatles song was played in its full length. It's believed this is the only time Revolution 9 was played in its entirety on Norwegian radio.
The last episode was aired 2007-12-13, and when christmas 2007 arrived, all 212 podcasts were put out for download at nrk.no as a christmas present for all Beatles fans, with the music removed. A real treasure, even though I had this cron job running every day to download each episode. Still, it was nice to get the complete collection.
This January NRK was planning to release every episode with the music. They got a deal with TONO (the Norwegian RIAA) and everything was OK, but it turned out that the agreement with IFPI and FONO only allowed publishing shows aired the last four weeks, and as mentioned, these programs were aired in 2007, so the podcasts had to be pulled.
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.