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The Beatles On iTunes
Yesterday Apple put a big old teaser up on their homepage for an unknown
announcement to occur today. Speculation ran rampant from the delayed
iOS 4.2, to iTunes Streaming to a release of the Beatles catalog on the iTunes
store. Well, it was the latter. They have 13 albums on the store now, and a $150
box set. So here's hoping that we get that iPad multitasking yet this November.
Meanwhile, the CD box set is selling for $130 on amazon (and I thought I read recently someone was offering it for around $100). I thought downloads were supposed to be cheaper than the physical CDs.
Meh. The Beatles are overrated.
Perhaps I just don't like the Beatles enough to think this is a good thing ... but ...
My solution to bands who 'refuse' to be put on iTunes, for any reason?
I don't buy their shit. I won't buy anything from the Beatles or Metallica ever again for that reason, even if they change their minds later.
You guys go cater to their self absorbed temper tantrums and sense of entitlement. I'll pass and buy things from people who actually appreciate my money.
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Meh. The Beatles are overrated.
I tend to agree, but only because they are so very, very, unquestioningly highly rated by so many.
It's also easy to dismiss them, as an overreaction to the adulation. Your post underrates them.
A few hours with Beatles Rock Band (which is a great motivator for attentive listening) will remind you that they *were* very good indeed.
If you don't already own every Beatles album, I feel sorry for you.
Does borrowing your grandfathers copies count? They are interesting, but with the cultural reference points being half a century ago, they are kind of hard to relate to like the kids half a century related to them. One of those "you had to be there" moments.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's a testament to baby boomer narcissism that this is such a BFD from Apple.
Big new software update? No. Verizon iPhone? No. ZOMG U CAN HAZ BEETULZ ON TEH iPhone NOW!
If Disney opened up its vault, that'd at least make sense since they stop publishing a lot of their animated classics for long periods of time.
And yet there's the trademark dispute over the Apple brand...
Since apparently you weren't paying attention, there was the trademark dispute but it was permanently resolved years ago.
(BTW it's amusing that you use the sosumi example instead of when they later sued when Apple started iTunes -- which I felt they actually had a solid basis on which to stand.)
To be fair, no band could live up to the hype the Beatles get. Not even the Kinks.
And if I was an "audiophile" and cared about the pixie dust, I might care. Back in the real world, 90% of human beings won't be able to tell the difference between that rip that the "professional sound engineers" spent "months" on (which I highly doubt in the first place), and your 196Kbps rip using CDEX + LAME.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
>Both are scarcely more than a thin veneer over the status quo.
Oh, I wouldn't say that about the Beatles. If you look at the Beatles peers when they were active you'll see that they weren't just "white plastic on OEM crap." Lets skip past their early stuff which is admittingly cookie cutter to Rubber Soul's release in 1965. The Billboard top 100 had acts like Sonny and Cher and songs like "Wooley Bully." Or when the Beatles released Revolver in 1966, the charts were leading with stuff like the Mamas and Papas. Sgt Peppers was released in 1967 when the Billboards top song was stuff like I'm A Believer by the Monkees. Its weird to even think of them as competing peers considering how far and away Sgt Peppers is from anything mainstream release.
I think the Beatles really earned their reputation as game changers. They're one of the first rock bands to really begin exploring outside the mainstream, challenge the status quo, and succeeding at this without alienating listeners. Its odd to think that by 1969 they were pretty much done, but if you listen to a lot of the music from the 1970s you'll hear quite a bit of Beatles influence. I think they really wrote the template on how to make rock music that isn't just disposable catchy hits and could be something closer to fine art than just music to dance/get high/get laid to.
A few hours with Beatles Rock Band
And this is the extent of your musical knowledge, no wonder you like the Beatles.
I find their music uninteresting and the hype annoying.
I do play real guitar - among other instruments - and take pleasure in more complex forms than The Beatles, as well as in more minimal and direct music.
However I'll continue to defend Guitar Hero / Rock Band as a tool for music appreciation. It draws your attention to details of the parts that are easy to overlook. It's a good way to actually concentrate on music -- few people nowadays listen to music and give it their full attention.
I find it a bit strange that you could find the whole Beatles canon uninteresting. There's a hell of a lot of variety in there: She Loves You, Taxman, Eleanor Rigby, I am the Walrus, I Want You (She's So Heavy), Helter Skelter, I Got A Feeling ... all very different from one another.
Besides, they broke up 40 years ago, most of this stuff was recorded before a lot of the people posting here were even born. This is the kind of stuff that should be in the public domain, if we didn't have ridiculous copyright periods that perpetuate the right to make money from the same content ad infinitum. People who rush out to buy this stuff again just give ammo to the labels demanding ever longer copyrights.
I think the real story is that you're an alien from a planet on which several days can occur in the span of 24 earth hours. That teaser went up just a day ahead of the announcement.
Besides the Beatles are pretty much the best selling band of all time. In the 2000s only eminem sold more records then the Beatles. In a decade three full decades after the broke up, and with out a new medium to be released on they were the second best selling artist. They may not be a big deal to you but they are a pretty big deal.
$150 for 40 year old music as degraded-format MP3's is totally worth it. (Abbey Road was released in 1970). Soon it will be super-classic (50 years old) and the Distributors will want $300.00
The fact that the laws allow corporate renumeration still for 40-year-old tunes is almost warrant enough to disregard copyright. We'll likely see it on blueray and the next format and the next. As is it's already seen 7 format releases: Album (78/45/33), 8-Track, Tape, CD, Album (vinyl-again), Rock-Band, MP3s
There are many bands who have excessive catalogs of music - that I just can't be bothered to wade thru. Any band that's survived 20 years has had their label push numerous "Best of" compilations. The same songs will appear again and again, yet each time there will be one or two new tracks.
Perhaps it's just me but considering all that, older CDs/Music are valued (by the owners/distributors) far too highly. If there were offers of "Buy this (new) Album get 1/2/3 previous albums for free, I would think many people including myself would purchase a lot more music.
I certainly can't afford to buy all the music I would want, so instead I buy a handful of albums a year.
There were no downloads then, and LPs are far superior to any lossily compressed music.
Yeah, that's the popular meme. But of course the process of making LPs is lossy, as is recording to magnetic tape. When the music was remastered in the 80s, they tried to boost the low gain frequency bands, which annoyed the LP listeners who like the "warm" sound you get without high frequencies.. But you can always fix that digitally if you want. With appropriate band cuts, and addition of some hiss and pop, you too can make a CD sound like an LP. You might have to add some more band modification and some 60Hz hum to model that 1970s era amplifier and speakers. I'll be surprised if you could tell "lossy" 256kbps MP3 from the CD.
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