Beatles music sale online
Updated on 03 November 2009
The Beatles' record label EMI investigates after the Fab Four's entire back catalogue goes on sale online for as little as 15p a track.
Long-running legal wrangles mean the Beatles songs have never been sold digitally - but now California based website BlueBeat is selling 500 songs and their recently released digitally remastered albums.
The website has pledged to stop what it describes as "the insanity of overpriced online music", but EMI says it has not given permission for the sales.
Eamonn Forde of Music Week told Channel 4 News: "Nobody has heard of this service before. Suddenly it has launched and got a lot of coverage at the end of last week, not only because it was offering the Beatles catalogue but also because it was massively under-cutting the competition.
"I think it was selling for 25 cents per track in the US while iTunes is around 99 cents per track. Other services are selling for slightly lower but iTunes controls most of the market.
"A number of other services have made the Beatles' catalogue available, there is a site in Russia called allofmp3.ru that obviously went through a series of litigation by the record industry, it was completely unlicensed.
"BlueBeat does not have the rights from EMI to sell the stuff, EMI say they are investigating.
"It has simply uploaded the stuff and is selling it and so it is basically a case of protracted legal take-down notices which could take some time.
"The Beatles back catalogue has not been sold online because Apple Corp controls their rights. Most artists when they assign the rights to a record company, the record company can license it to services with all the other catalogue.
"The Beatles are a very unique case because they have got such control over their catalogue, so basically EMI and the Beatles will need to come to an agreement about whether they want to license their stuff for digital download and also at what price.
"One of the issues the Beatles had with the likes of iTunes is that people were able to unbundle albums and sell individual tracks rather than whole albums, iTunes won't change its position on that because it sees it as anti-consumer, the Beatles certainly believed a number of years ago they wanted to sell entire albums rather than let people cherry pick tracks as they saw fit.
"The Beatles are very powerful in legal terms. I don't think this site will be able to get away with too much without the Beatles' say so."
