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No Beatles Yet, iTunes Gets John Lennon

By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews

August 14, 2007, 4:34 PM

Although the library of Beatles music isn't expected to be available digitally until next year, Apple announced Tuesday that it has made available the solo catalog of John Lennon. 16 works from EMI have been posted on iTunes, although all but two were available for purchase on other services previously.

The “Lennon Legend” and “Acoustic” collections are making their digital debut on iTunes, and for the next 30 days, exclusive video content will be included with the albums "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band," "Sometime in New York City,; "Walls and Bridges," "Milk and Honey" and the collections "Anthology" and "Working Class Hero." All tracks are available in DRM-free form for $1.29 USD per song.

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By imafurby

posted Aug 15, 2007 - 9:07 AM

What about Yoko?

Score: 0

By lvthunder

posted Aug 14, 2007 - 7:40 PM

You also have to factor in your time and gas or shipping costs to that equation too.

Score: 0

By bakura

posted Aug 14, 2007 - 6:12 PM

I don't get your point. The link you provided shows the CD costs $12.97 on Amazon, but on iTunes you get the same music plus a music video for $11.99.

Score: 0

By Paul Skinner

posted Aug 15, 2007 - 4:34 AM

My bad. Didn't look at the price for the whole album; only the single songs.

Still, it's not much more and you get the full quality songs, plus a coaster is you don't have a use for the CD after you've ripped it.
It's worth the 50p to me at least.

Score: 0

By bobthegoat2001

edited Aug 15, 2007 - 3:29 AM

"you get the same music"

Maybe the same music, but not the same quality and freedom. iTunes only has AAC files that you can only play on your iPod [and for the most part are also DRMed]. Yeah you can convert it to MP3 or whatever, but that makes the crappy 256kbit/s sound even worse. I've heard the new bitrate doesn't really sound any better than the 128kbit/s counter part. I'm too lazy to post a link, but if you really want a link I'm sure the Google can give you a link.

You could also get it used on Amazon.com, currently as I post this it's only $6.97. About half that than on iTunes. Plus if you get the CD you can convert it to MP3, AAC, Ogg Flac at any bitrate you want without loosing any quality, since it was 'CD' quality in the first place. And that means it'll work on any 'MP3' player.

If you buy albums (like me) I don't think it's worth it buying from places like iTunes. Especially iTunes since it only works on iPods. I normally buy my CD's used on Amazon.com. You can sometimes find good deals on CD's, sometimes for even $0.01. You can't beat that price!

Score: 0

By bakura

posted Aug 15, 2007 - 6:49 PM

You're comparing apples to oranges... Of course, you can typically get used items cheaper than new ones. You don't walk into a store like Best Buy and get a new product for used prices. I was referring to the prices of two 'new' products.

I've purchased used CDs from Amazon.com before. You can find some great deals!

That said, I've been really happy with the quality of the iTunes 256kbit/s tracks. I do have an iPod, so the fact that they are AAC format is not an issue for me (although it is an issue for many others). I like that I don't have to go through the process of ripping my music from a CD anymore to get decent sounding tracks. However, I typically do still rip from a CD if an iTunes Plus quality track is not available.

Score: 0

By bobthegoat2001

edited Aug 16, 2007 - 12:42 AM

" I do have an iPod, so the fact that they are AAC format is not an issue for me (although it is an issue for many others)."

Yeah, it is pretty convenient to just download the songs. There is another problem though I see is that since the iPod is basically the only MP3 player that supports AAC is that once you do buy music from iTunes, your basically stuck with only getting iPods since your purchased music won't play on anything else. That's one of the main reasons I still get CD's.

What I do though is I'll rip all my CD's into Flac files (a lossless compression). Then from there I convert it to Ogg. That way if I do decide to change to MP3 or some other format I can just batch convert all my Flac files into whatever format I want, without having to re-rip all my CD's. My CD's won't get scratched that way either.

Score: 0

By Paul Skinner

posted Aug 14, 2007 - 5:32 PM

Why the **** would you pay $1.29 a song when you can buy the CD for the equivalent of $0.65 a song *and* have it higher fidelity?

Reference:
http://www.amazon.com/Le...d=1187126984&sr=8-1

Score: 0

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