Yesterday
Apple (the computer company) had an exciting announcement to make today … this is what they said yesterday (see left) … it turns out it was the worst kept secret in music … The Beatles were coming to iTunes.
Word on the street was that all this cloak and dagger foreplay from the California technology giants was the prelude to the end of one of the longest running branding disputes in musical history … the infamous Apple versus Apple affair … and the word, was right.
There may have been chinks of light in the past (most notably in 2007 when we thought it was over … but nothing happened), but now Apple Corps (The Beatles record label) and Apple Inc (the iTunes people) have finally have worked out their differences and found a way for The Beatles back catalogue to be sold to us all over again … digitally via iTunes.
The companies had been at loggerheads since 1978 when Apple Corps first took out a law suit against Apple Inc for trademark infringement over the use of an Apple logo. Over the next 30 years, the companies met in court on several occasions, and despite a 2007 ruling in the favour of Steve Jobs’s lot, Apple and Apple have never found a way to work together … until now.
The upshot of this ongoing dispute had meant the exclusion of The Beatles music from iTunes, making it a place you can buy almost any song in the world … except the best ones.
But now everything has changed, because from 3pm GMT today Beatles fans have been given something very special – the chance to legally download all of the band’s studio albums (and a couple of compilations) for more than the price of the CD in the shop … hoorah!
Steve Jobs had made no secret of the fact that he (along with most right-minded music lovers) is a fan of The Beatles and would love to see them for sale in the iTunes stable … but has he had to make any special exceptions to attract the Fab Four?
CD sales are more lucrative for a record company than digital downloads, so without a tempting deal (with a higher than normal cut), would Apple Inc really have moved over to the digital-dark side? Some commentators are already speculating that the two Apples will have a ‘special relationship’ in terms of sales in order to ensure their new found bond does not go rotten.
This would kind of make sense, because as we already know, iTunes barely makes a profit as a stand-alone entity, it is merely used as a promotional tool to hook consumers into buying (the much more profitable) hardware that accompanies it … your iPhones, iPods and the like.
... and today
Therefore, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if Apple Inc had to sell The Beatles tracks at a slightly lower royalty than usual, because in real terms they wouldn’t have stood to make much money out of the deal anyway.
No, what Apple Inc would get from the deal is much better than thirty-percent of 79p … they’ll get a massive PR event the likes of which the music industry rarely sees. They’ll get the chance to market iTunes with the biggest band in the world ever, and sell another squillion iPods off the back of it … now that’s Apple sense.
I don’t really understand why CD sales are more lucrative than downloads. It seems to me it would be the other way around. With downloads there’s so little overhead .. you don’t have to create the CDs .. package them … ship them out. Once you set up the system it should pretty much run on it’s own with a higher % of profits.
I’d be very curious to see why this isn’t the case… It just doesn’t make sense to me.