Thoughts On The Non-Beatles Non-Announcement

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on September 05, 2007

I don’t know why I care so much at this point other than I’ve been writing about the rocky relationship between Apple and The Beatles for so so so very freakin’ long. But the fact that Apple didn’t announce that the Beatles are coming to iTunes, as has been hinted at for many months now, could be seen as a big disappointment. But its almost reached the point that there’s no one left to disappoint.

But, I’m clearly not the only one thinking about it. Jim Goldman had Steve Jobs on CNBC a few minutes ago and asked him what the deal is between Apple and The Beatles right now. He said he hoped to have a deal done within the next six months to bring the Beatles back catalog to iTunes. Will anyone care in six months? Who’s advising The Beatles to wait on this?

It’s funny. I heard on a local radio show that Paul McCartney was seen in the bar at The American Hotel in Sag Harbor, NY over the weekend. I walk by The American Hotel about once a weekend, and will sometimes stop in for something to eat. Had we bumped I would have stopped him and asked “What the heck are you thinking? What are you waiting for? What better moment than now?” Then I’d explain that there’s a whole generation of music buyers who will in all likelihood bypass CDs entirely for their entire music-buying lives in favor of downloads, which as we all know means buying almost entirely on iTunes, or — and let’s be realistic — downloading pirated stuff from BitTorrent and elsewhere wherever else pirated music is found these days.

Worse, this generation will have every reason for bypassing the work of The Beatles entirely. To my generation — I was a teen in the 1980s — The Beatles served as a bridge between children’s music and adult music. My parents gave me their Beatles records when I was 10 years old, starting with the early 1964-65 bubble-gum stuff like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” As I got older and reached junior and senior high school I graduated to more sophisticated and complex albums like “Rubber Soul” and “Abbey Road,” and “Revolver” and became a veritable Beatles junkie in the process. But I also branched out from The Beatles to The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, all the while appreciating modern releases all more against the context of everything else that had come before. Today’s younger generations need no such bridge, and if they do, it certainly need not be The Beatles. For all I know it could be Beck or Britney Spears. But without having their music on iTunes, I fear The Beatles run the risk of losing their cultural relevancy with the younger generations who can and will pass them by simply because they’re not on their radar screens. They won’t dream about their first boyfriends or girlfriends when they hear “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” or wonder what “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” is really about.

They’re certainly not buying CDs. Steve covered this today in his remarks: Nearly one-third of all new releases in the U.S. were digital-only, as in “NOT RELEASED ON CD,” which you can translate into record-industry lingo as follows: THERE IS NO DEMAND FOR CDs.

It would seem to me that if Apple gave the Beatles whatever terms they want — short of variable pricing, the great sacred cow of the iTunes business model — it can make it all up on the publicity hit that would follow a Beatles/iTunes launch. Heck, why not just give them whatever is left on the table from the sale of each song for the first year? It’s not like Apple can’t afford to take a loss of a few pennies per song on say 10 million downloads. Let’s say ten cents times 10 million: That’s a measly million bucks. Boost the number to 100 million downloads and make it $10 million. That’s less than what Apple pays to settle class-action lawsuits every time it launches a new iPod that annoys a few dozen people by being somehow imperfect. Imagine the TV ads, the cooperative marketing, and the boost in sales of iPods to people who might never have bothered to consider buying one before?

Paul, Ringo, Yoko, Neil, Steve. What’s the holdup? The whole world is waiting. Or is it? Please would you just get on with it already? It’s reached the point where I care, but I almost don’t want to care anymore. And if this Beatles junkie can reach the point of not caring whether The Beatles ever end up on iTunes, then I’m certainly not the only one who will consider the eventual announcement no big deal.

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