'Lost' Beatles song may bring Fab Four to Net sales

Are The Beatles finally ready to make a magical mystery tour into the world of online music?

A "lost" track recorded by the band in 1967 and performed only once in public could finally be released, Paul McCartney told the BBC in an interview, according to a report Sunday in The Observer newspaper. The 14-minute "Carnival of Light" was never released because it was considered too "adventurous," McCartney said.

McCartney said he has the master recording and wants the public to hear it.

"I like it because it's The Beatles free, going off piste," he said in the interview. "The time has come for it to get its moment."

McCartney said he lobbied to get the track included with the album Anthology when the exhaustive compilation was released in 1995, but the idea was vetoed.

Of course, the Ringo Starr and the estates of John Lennon and George Harrison would still need to approve of the track's release.

Short of releasing another compilation that goes over the same territory as Anthology, an online release may be the song's only commercial avenue.

The band, which has been fiercely resistant to having its music made available for purchase online, has been the subject of frequent rumors that it was ready to make the leap. The Beatles became one of the last high-profile digital music holdouts after Led Zeppelin announced late last year that it would make its catalog available for purchase online.

[gsmiller88]

God only knows how much they'll want for the ONE track.

[nutso101]

Wow, after all these years the Beatles are still coming out with interesting stuff.

[AJ Pants]

Yawn. How many 'lost tracks' have we seen from the Beatles.

Who cares.

[adasha76]

I guess you're either too young or too ignorant to appreciate the impact the Beatles had on music.

Answer: lots of people care.

[rcrusoe]

Oh please, enough of the Beatles coming to the net stories. I'm a Beatles fan and, like just about every other fan on the planet, I have had their music on my iPod and music server for years.

I ripped my vinyl Beatles records and finished my collection with about $20 worth of CDs from Amazon a long time ago. Based on all the p*ssing and moaning from the RIAA everyone else has already downloaded their entire collection.

In any event, IMO, no one is waiting for their music to come to iTunes or AmazonMP3.

[Spartanicus]

Not entirely true. I had all the albums on vinyl in my youth, and never replaced my set with CDs (I'd heard them so often that I spent 20 years without the need to listen) ... were the albums available for download, I'd absolutely buy them. But, I'm not going to bother buying CDs at this stage - I don't feel like spending an evening ripping the whole lot of them (I've plenty of other more pressing things to do). So - laziness wins; but if they were conveniently available, there's no doubt I'd purchase them. I can't believe I'm the only one in this category....

[mssoot]

Listen, you all have to stop sending you bootleg cd's to Ringo for signature, he just trashes them

[SactoGuy018]

It will be very interesting to see who gets the download rights to this 14-minute song. Any server that legally hosts this song better hope they can handle the load because you can expect millions of copies to be downloaded just in one day.