Music sources: Phantom Yoko Ono-iTunes story untrue

(Credit: Apple Corp.)

Sky News, the 24-hour British news operation, apparently posted a story that cited Yoko One as saying the Beatles' catalog was coming to iTunes.

The story disappeared not long after, but not before someone took a screen shot of the headline and a tease, which said: "The whole of the Beatles back catalog will be made available to buy on iTunes, Yoko Ono has told Sky News." Sky News officials would not comment and has yet to issue a correction.

This is the kind of juicy what-if situation that Apple fans live for and the speculation that the Fab Four's music could finally arrive at iTunes hit overdrive Tuesday evening. But the problem is it's simply not true. The Beatles' catalog is not coming to iTunes, at least if one is to believe EMI officials and other music industry insiders with knowledge of the Beatles-iTunes negotiations.

EMI owns the Beatles' sound recordings, while Sony/ATV owns the publishing rights. Ernesto Schmitt, EMI's global catalog president, told The Financial Times that that the catalog would not be part of Apple's press event on Wednesday.

I checked with my music industry sources, some of whom have direct knowledge of the talks between EMI and Apple Corp., the company that represents the Beatles, and they also said the negotiations have not yielded an agreement. All Things Digital reported the same earlier.

How about this? If Sky News did nail this kind of whopper scoop, the organization would most certainly be ballyhooing its sweet piece of journalism, not hiding it. But as of 5 p.m. PDT Tuesday, that's exactly what what was happening. The story was nowhere to be found on the site.

What's far more likely at this point is that something went wrong at Sky News.

Anyone who has followed iTunes news has seen these rumors come and go. In the past, regardless of how delicious they've sounded, they've all been debunked.

[cpopken]

Ok, I don't understand why everyone gets so excited about the possibility of the Beatles music being on itunes. It's not like you can't rip a CD you have. With the box set coming out on the 9th I really don't see the reason why people get worked up about it being on itunes. I understand about the convenience of downloading, but are we getting that lazy?

[Argyll]

Who are the Beatles?

[vmlenigma]

Ill Take Brittany ETHPEARTHS over the Beatles any day

[ktswami]

As a huge Beatles fan, I find it amusing to no end that EMI & Apple Corps. will not release the Beatles catalog to iTunes and others (notwithstanding tomrrow). And EMI-Apple Corps would get 80% profit from every iTunes Beatles song sold anyway. That's not enough?

While they squeeze every last dollar out of the catalog with pathetic gaming tie-ins and continue to sell millions of CDs every year, it should be noted that the P2P networks are on fire with Beatles torrents.
http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=beatles+torrent&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

BigChampagne is saying that ~100M downloads happen ever year whether EMI does a deal or not...ouch.
http://www.paidcontent.org/article/419-beatles-online-100-million-illegal-tracks-are-already-free-as-a-bird/

[Constable Odo]

They're waiting for all the Beatles to die before putting their music on iTunes. You see how well that worked out for Michael Jackson's music sales.

I likely have all of their most popular songs on vinyl and from CDs and have listened to them since the 60's so it's no big deal to me one way or another.

[SactoGuy018]

I think in the end there will be an announcement that the remastered Beatles albums will be available on the iTunes Store, but not until probably early November, complete with the "Cocktail" digital album liner notes. EMI wants to make as much money possible on the remastered CD releases before releasing them to the iTunes Store.

Now, there is also a HUGE wildcard in this: the Amazon MP3 Download service. Who's to say that literally out of the blue, EMI announces the remastered albums are available for download from the Amazon MP3 Download service in the USA and UK starting tomorrow, of all things?

[Naimo5577]

Since I'm not a big Beatles fan, I didn't know they weren't on iTunes.
I just assumed they were...I am simply speechless that they're not.
Why on Earth, after all this time, have they passed on the opportunity to practically print money by being on iTunes?? The mind utterly boggles.

This conclusively establishes that record executives are the uncontestable superlative of human stupidity and ignorance.

[perfectblue97]

Big deal, it's Sky News. Sky News is the sister company of FOX, and we can't even trust FOX to tell us the truth about the weather, let alone actual news.

Sky is the supermarket tabloid of news channels. The Beatles on iTunes was probably announced between a story about Obama being related to Bigfoot, and one about him eating babies.