The Beatles on iTunes Store: Is it Still Relevant?

On Monday night, Apple teased the world about something really exciting coming to iTunes. It dedicated its entire front page of its website to a statement saying “Tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget.” Below that statement was a series of clocks.

20 minutes short of 24 hours later, what Apple wanted to announce at 10:00pm WIB had leaked. Apparently Apple revealed the surprise a little bit early. That surprise was The Beatles are finally available on iTunes.

The Beatles had been the most prominent band yet to join the digital distribution model although their music had been available on a special edition of Rock Band video game and can be purchased in a USB flash drive.

Of course, Apple, Inc. and Apple Corps., The Beatles recording label, had been in a legal battle over the use of the name Apple between 1976 and 2007 when the two parties finally came to an agreement whereby Apple, Inc. won the rights to use the name in relation to the music industry. As part of the agreement, Apple, Inc. licensed the name to Apple Corps.

Despite the agreement, it took Apple until this month before it could release the entire catalog of The Beatles recordings both audio and video on its iTunes Store. Apple then proceeded to blanket the front page of its website as well as the iTunes store landing page with The Beatles.

The move however drew ire from all over the internet as Apple’s hype machine kicked into overdrive the night before its unveiling. The typically cryptic announcement sparked the Twitterverse and tech blogs into a frenzy of questions and speculations.

Even the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times got in on the hysteria as both published stories claiming insider information that The Beatles was what Apple was planning to announce all along.

The Beatles, of course had been the subject of speculation since the day Apple opened the iTunes Music Store in 2003. In the intervening years, the band had always been mentioned every time Apple invited the press to an announcement, whether it was at Macworld Expo, at WWDC, or at Apple’s own private events.

Eventually people became tired of waiting and it became something that they hoped for but never really expected to happen.

People were upset about how Apple framed the event as The Beatles had become much less relevant to the hordes of Apple watchers and the industry. The most awaited news out of iTunes had become a sad anticlimax.

Many were expecting Apple to announce iTunes cloud services following its purchase of music streaming company Lala several months ago but it wasn’t to be, at least not at this time.

Apple’s announcements had historically been about products and technology, not so much about content. Then again, Apple had always held keynote speeches for such announcements with an invitation one week prior. This time though, it was different. It was an announcement on the website with a 24 hour notice.

There was no keynote, no Steve Jobs, no army of journalists and bloggers waiting outside Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater or Apple’s own auditorium. Just a website covered in all manners of The Beatles.

Clearly Apple, or someone at Apple (presumably Steve Jobs), is hugely excited about this achievement that it had seemed to be a personal crusade to transform the company website and iTunes Store into a shrine for the boys from Liverpool.

Of course, all this is largely irrelevant to the fans who are most likely to have owned every piece of recording that the band had ever released. Albums, singles, remastered editions, and repackaged box sets have been available for decades on cassettes, video tapes, LaserDiscs, CDs, and DVDs.

Millions of people already have The Beatles in their iTunes collections courtesy of their albums having been exported from CDs and stored in their computer’s hard drives and portable music players.

The albums on iTunes aren’t even complete. Apple only has made available the band’s 13 studio albums, masters collection, and hits collections with none of the live performance albums or the special release albums. While there is also a “box set” containing all of the 16 albums and collections, every one of the albums and collections are more expensive than having to go and buy them at a record store or at Amazon.

Perhaps this is not about existing fans. Perhaps this is about future fans or those who have yet to complete their collection. Perhaps this is about the symbolic transition of music distribution from physical to digital formats which began with Napster in the mid 90s.

For all the songs ever downloaded or sold over the internet, perhaps November 16, 2010 was the day that the music industry finally succumbed to the realization that there is no going back to physical distribution of music recordings.

For Indonesian readers, this whole episode unfortunately means nothing as Apple has no music or video section in the country’s iTunes Store, only podcasts and mobile apps. Neither The Beatles nor any other band are available to purchase online from the local iTunes Store.

This was something that’s relevant only to the 20 or so countries in which iTunes Store sells music.