Slashdot Mirror
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.
>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.
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.