What a suprise, cash stricken EMI makes a bumper deal with iTunes to finally sell The Beatles' records on their music store. Weeks after Terra Firma lost their multi-million court case iTunes announces the sales of every album from this Livepudlian band. Every album is priced at £10.99 with individual singles costing 99p. It's hard to see which Beatles fan will want to buy all this when they've likely to have already bought all the back issues of the albums on Cd and just burnt them on their computer. This might be a big step for iTunes and EMI but it isn't like people haven't been downloading Beatles tracks already, sites such as Pirate Bay offer the complete collection, but they didn't make a big fuss about adding them to their listings.
There is another offer for big Beatles fans, you can purchase an 'online box set' of the Beatles for only £125. It seems that The Beatles might be trying to save EMI once more. Apple built up the fact The Beatles would be on their music store earlier in the week, with all the albums going on sale 20 minutes before the expected time of 3pm.
When going onto the iTunes store the homepage immediately flashes up with The Beatles, unlike normal iTunes viewing there is no advertisement for 'App of the week' like usual, instead there are nice neat boxes all containing pictures of the 60s rockers. Clicking on them sends you straight to a page about The Beatles; of which straight away advertises the £125 box set straight away.
There are some key questiosn that really need to be answered about this subject; is this an attempt from EMI to make The Beatles save them once more? How well will the sales actually do? And lastly; has this been in the pipeline for a while, or has it come to that time of year again where a desperate EMI looks for some cash flow to help balance the books?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/nov/16/beatles-albums-launch-itunes
Well done, Jamie.
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