Apple has primed its website for an iTunes-related announcement which it promises will live long in the memory.
“Tomorrow us just another day. That you’ll never forget,” Apple proclaimed on its website last night, above a row of clocks indicating that it will make the announcement at 3pm, UK time.
According to the Wall Street Journal and music business newspaper Billboard, the unforgettable announcement will be the arrival of The Beatles on Apple’s music store.
“The smart money on tomorrow’s mysterious iTunes announcement is that Apple will finally be adding the Beatles catalog to the digital music store,” Billboard says.
“That’s not fully confirmed, but after a day of phone calls, emails and cryptic messages, Billboard.biz is sticking its neck out and saying this is what we’re going to hear tomorrow.”
Similarly, the WSJ cites evidence from “people familiar with the situation”, though it cautions that “Apple could change plans at the last minute”.
Veteran music journalist David Hepworth thinks that even if it is The Beatles, the news will hardly be as memorable as Apple suggests.
“Apart from newspaper journalists, who’s bothered about The Beatles on iTunes?,” he asked on Twitter.
Certainly anyone clamouring for the bands’ recordings is likely to have snapped up the acclaimed remasters of the band LPs which were released on CD just two years ago.
The iTunes release has been held up by a series of disputes, most notably a prolonged trademark between Apple and The Beatles’ Apple Corps record label, though that was resolved in 2007. Since then money is said to have been the problem, with the surviving members of the band — Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — and Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, wives of the late John Lennon and George Harrison, in dispute with record company EMI over how digital revenues should be shared.
In the meantime, the band has already had considerable download success, albeit of an illicit kind. According to BigChampagne, a research firm that monitors p2p file sharing, The Beatles are the most downloaded group of all time. In April 2009, it estimated that the bands’ songs had been downloaded “perhaps 100 million” times.
