Beatles online: downloads 55 cents per track
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- At last, a digital music sales site has it right.
Kind of.
Bluebeat, a US company, is selling Beatles songs for 55 cents — 25 cents per track + 30 cents for ‘processing’.
That’s still way too high. But it’s considerably better than the $1 and up rip-off demanded by Apple for its iTunes iPod online loader, paid for by gullible consumers.
By dint of repeated use by other corporate music ’services,’ a minimum of $1 each for tracks worth only a few cents has become the de facto standard.
EMI, which owns the Beates copyrights, is suing the company for you-know-what.
However, the lawsuit notwithstanding, at 7:40 am Pacific, Bluebeat was still offering what seems to be the full range of Beatles tunes.
Not only but also, it’s continuing to stream Beatles albums, including the new remastered versions, for free.
This doesn’t, of course, make any kind of difference to the online availability of songs from the Fab Four. They’ve been downloadable from the various P2P networks since the year dot.
But anyway, “EMI, which distribs Beatles recordings via an agreement with the group’s music company, Apple Corps, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the company Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles,” says Variety.
BlueBeat is a division of Media Rights Technologies and “In a twist ripe with irony, representatives of Media Rights Technologies recently wrote to the Librarian of Congress asking that the webcasting licenses of such firms as iTunes, Pandora and MSN Music be revoked on piracy grounds,” says the story.
Meanwhile, EMI has (repeatedly) “expressed anger at the news that the Fab Four were being sold online without its permission,” says Music 
Ally, adding:
“But what about those USB drives. EMI and Apple Corps made the announcement last night, revealing that they will sell 30,000 apple-shaped devices, with the 14 recently-remastered Beatles albums preloaded as FLAC and MP3 files. They go on sale on 7 November in Europe and 8 November in the US, with a price point of £200 in the UK and $279.99 in the US.”
No! Honestly!
Good luck with that, guys. 
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Variety – Fab Four faux pas, November 4, 2009
Music Ally – Beatles for sale digitally on USB apples as EMI sues BlueBeat, November 4, 2009
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