Paul McCartney: EMI Won’t Let Apple Put Beatles Catalogue on iTunes

Paul McCartney: EMI Won’t Let Apple Put Beatles Catalogue on iTunes

With the hatchet between Apple Computers and Apple Records long buried and the digitally restored catalogue sounding better than ever, the continued absence of The Beatles from iTunes is a bigger mystery than ever. Don’t blame Apple, though… either Apple. According to former Beatle Paul McCartney, it’s EMI gumming up the works.

“To tell you the truth I don’t actually understand how it’s got so crazy,” Sir Paul told Newsbeat. “I know iTunes would like to do it, so one day it’s going to happen.”

“It’s been business hassles”, he said. “Not with us, or iTunes. It’s the people in the middle, the record label [EMI]. There have been all sorts of reasons why they don’t want to do it.”

On their part, EMI say that discussions are ongoing, and claim that they would love to see The Beatles’ music available on iTunes. Translation: they want a much bigger cut of the iTunes pie, and you’ll have to rip your Beatles’ tracks yourself until Apple caves… which I seriously doubt Cupertino has any intention of doing.

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The impasse continues.

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iTunes, Music, News |

  • Rory Parker

    If you don’t already own the Beatles box set, you don’t deserve to live.

  • http://wholelottarob.com Dr Rob Schertzer

    Actually, Benny, EMI belongs in the past; the Beatles are timeless. Current alleged singers yelping into their auto-tuners will not stand the test of time like the Beatles who could actually sing without being pitch altered.

  • HD Boy

    No big deal to long-time fans who just rip Beatles tracks from your own CDs. Greedy EMI execs are out to lunch on this one — they are relegating The Beatles to a single, aging generation who already own CD versions of albums (though perhaps their children also may rip the same CD albums before heading off to college).

  • Darcy McGee

    By which time pretty much everyone will have liberated the music anyway, leaving no one left to buy it from the iTunes Music Store.

  • Peter Bloom

    Just RIP any decent Beatles CD album, and then upload it as a high-quality bitrate MP3 into your iTunes.

    If EMI won’t sell it, then people will rip it from their CDs. Simple. iTunes/iPod users are not the losers here. EMI is the only loser here.

  • paul

    I agree that EMI is the onlyu looser. It doesn’t make sense to me. Everryone that like the beetles has their music or has access to it. Just upload it as noted above.

    A side not. I just heard that apple offered some guy over a $1,000,000 for the domain ibanks.com and he is refusing. Strange.

  • IcyFog

    Just rip the CDs. Not that big of deal.
    EMI is losing out though.