The Beatles On iTunes 551
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.
Re:White Album (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cheaper to buy CDs (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about the CD set, but the iTunes version has the iTunes LP extras including two of their original concerts. I'm not a Beatles guy at all, as I'm under 35, but I do respect the influence they've had on music.
Re:If you don't already.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:too late (Score:3, Informative)
While this is going to be a big stir for Apple, the truth of the matter is that most of the money they make from this is only going to be for the al a carte type crowd. I'm sure they will sell a ton of complete collections too but let's be honest; if you're over 25 and you don't own the Beatles stuff that you like? You're probably not going to buy whole albums here either....
Unless you're a total gimp who doesn't know how to rip a CD.
Re:Sosumi (Score:4, Informative)
Twas a piece of historical trivia.
And the Sosumi anecdote is funny, whereas the iTunes bit is not.
Re:Cheaper to buy CDs (Score:2, Informative)
I've never had that impression. I thought it cost around $9.99 to download most complete albums off of itunes (I'm guessing I don't use itumes). I can pay this for most albums on amazon.com to get the physical disc + album art - DRM.
iTunes music hasn't had DRM for several years.
Re:Jobs' Narcissism (Score:3, Informative)
It's a bit more subtle than that. The legal Apple vs Apple thing was resolve a while back, when Apple Computer Inc. bought the trademark outright and became Apple Inc. By this stage, Apple Records had sold all of the rights to anything Beatles related and so were irrelevant.
Apple Computer was originally named in part as an homage to Apple Corps because Steve Jobs was (and still is, apparently) a Beatles fan. He was somewhat put out when they saw this as trademark infringement rather than a compliment[1]. The ongoing lawsuits were a personal annoyance - as well as a business one - and probably a lesson to Steve about how destructive fanboyism can be (well, you'd hope). Getting The Beatles on iTunes was something he said that he wanted in interviews right back when iTMS launched, but until now the music has not been available for legal download anywhere. This is a personal coup for Steve Jobs - being able to distribute the music from the band that inspired him - and given the current Beatles sales is also probably going to be quite lucrative.
For the rest of us, it's a pretty dull announcement.
[1] Which somehow puts me in mind of Tom Lehrer's line: 'Copyright infringement is the sincerest form of flattery.'
Re:great! (Score:2, Informative)
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5960233/The_Beatles_For_iTunes_[Apple_Lossless]_compilation
Re:Lame non-news (Score:4, Informative)
Re:You don't want multi-tasking. (Score:3, Informative)
Well, having written both Android and iPhone applications, I can tell you that one OS was intended to run things like services and background processes, and the other was not. Apple likes to blame everyone else for their problems (or claim that everyone else has them), but creating a 'sort of' hybrid multi-tasking methodology of course leads to a problem like this. To be fair, the problem should be alleviated relatively shortly because app developers WILL learn how to live with the iOS shortcomings.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
The actual Beatles - Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr - have nothing against iTunes. McCartney's music has been available there for quite some time.
They lost control over their own music long ago. So you can avoid giving any money to the owners of the Beatles catalog, sure, but your rant about the artists' "self absorbed temper tantrums and sense of entitlement" is unwarranted.
Re:Good, but overrated products (Score:3, Informative)
The Beatles had a couple of things on their side that these others didn't and that was better recording equipment and more ability (ie. Money) to tool around the studio getting the sound that they wanted.
Nonsense.
Pink Floyd recorded Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in 1967 in Abbey Road studios - same place and same time when The Beatles were recording Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band. Various sources mention that both bands visited each other during the recording sessions in Spring 1967 (Pink Floyd visited The Beatles when the latter were recording It's Getting Better). 1. http://www.cs.umd.edu/~dekhtyar/pfdb/beatles.html [umd.edu] 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd#The_Piper_at_the_Gates_of_Dawn [wikipedia.org]
Floyd certainly admired the Beatles, and it would be splitting hairs to differentiate between admiration and influence -- they go hand in hand.
From the horses mouth, in an interview with Waters: You can draw a line between what I'm interested in and what I'm not interested in," he said. "On one side you can name Dylan and Lennon, who observe the world and have "feelings", and write songs directly from those feelings. On the vapid side you have pop groups who need material and write songs to fill the hole, rather than getting somebody else. But they might just as well get somebody else, because it's a manufacturing process. It's not poetry, because it doesn't spring from heart or guts or wherever John Lennon's or Dylan's songs came from. ... That's taken over an awful lot of the business. You could say, 'Well, why shouldn't it?' Absolutely no reason, so long as it doesn't take over and squeeze out the Lennons and Dylans because they're too good for it. 1. http://www.pinkfloyd-co.com/band/interviews/rw/rwmusician92.html [pinkfloyd-co.com]
Certainly the revolution between 1965 and 1975 was a group effort, with many musicians involved, but clearly the Beatles were leading the charge. (And for what it's worth, I don't like or own any of the Beatles' music, though I've owned almost every Floyd album released and several bootlegs. These days I'm ambivalent about music because I'm tired of the old, and there's little new of value being produced.)
Re:Compact music (Score:3, Informative)
...or pop your CD into your computer and use iTunes to create high quality fully-tagged audio files out of it for no additional cost.
Re:If you don't already.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If you don't already.... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, be surprised then, because I can definitely tell the difference between a 256kbps mp3 and a CD on a good stereo system. And I can definitely tell the difference between a lossless master file and a CD pressing. That 16 bit quantization and the frequency range clamping of CDs certainly cause degradation of the transients that give our brain more information about the sound we're hearing. I think the problem is, most people are listening with shitty systems or audio delivery devices (earbuds) that to most people the 192kbps mp3s sound just fine (and then wonder why their ears get "tired" so fast).
Not to say that vinyl mastering doesn't have its own problems, but a good mastering and vinyl presser can minimize that. And even with pristine digital audio we still have problems with bad DACs (or ADCs in the case of vinyl and most digital-based consumer amps), but the converters are at least a fixable problem from the consumer end. With vinyl, at least we can find a solution to preserve the extra frequency range as it comes out of whatever speakers we employ. The CD, and mp3s for that matter, well there's just no way to get those lost frequencies back, no matter how good our stereo is.
Re:White Album (Score:3, Informative)
The 24 bit lossless release from late last year is a dramatically better mastering than I've heard before.
The 24-bit lossless could have been more accurate than the CDs, if they had not had the dynamic range compression applied, but at least some comparisons [slimdevices.com] show that this is not case.
So, they might be "better" to some ears, but that seems to be the same group of ears that have remastered the Beatles albums before, with each one being worse than the last. The engineer doing the mastering on this last release admits to adding dynamic range compression, which by definition loses some of the original sound.