Beatles Ready for Legal Downloading Soon

The Beatles songs — all of them — will be offered for downloading soon. That’s what Neil Aspinall, the head of Apple Corps Ltd. and the man who’s protected the Beatles legacy for the last 40 years — told me over the weekend.“All 13 core albums, the ones originally released on CD in 1987, have been remastered," Aspinall told me. "At some point they will all be released, probably at the same time.”But the film “Let It Be” remains in DVD purgatory, Aspinall says. The reason? “The film was so controversial when it first came out. When we got halfway through restoring it, we looked at the outtakes and realized: This stuff is still controversial. It raised a lot of old issues.”
All rock groups — all musicians and artists — should have a protector as devoted or committed as Aspinall. He’s never sold the group or their legacy out, but instead been the fierce protector for nearly four decades.
Where others might have had the temptation to just cash out and take the billions of dollars being offered for one venture or another, Aspinall has proceeded with incredible care and caution.John Lennon and George Harrison especially must be smiling at the thought of Aspinall keeping their names away from crass endeavors.It was Aspinall who guided the Cirque du Soleil project, “Love,” which is not only a hit in Las Vegas, but is a bestselling CD as well. It’s the only album that EMI Music can claim as a hit from this past Christmas.Aspinall did confirm for me that not everything from the show is on the CD. “A lot of the transitions wouldn’t fit,” he said. And there will not be a DVD of the magnificent show at the Mirage.“The Mirage doesn’t want it,” he said. “They want people to come see it.”Now that Aspinall has “won” his longstanding lawsuit with Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer), he says downloaded Beatle songs will be coming to us soon.If you missed it, Apple Records sued Apple Computer in 2002 over trademark violations after signing a 1991 agreement — and Steve Jobs paying the Beatles about $43 million.Jobs et al won, but the case went to appeal. Before the appeals court could make a ruling, a settlement was reached.The settlement didn’t address downloading. But now Aspinall says that when the Beatles songs do get put on the Internet officially, “it will be on all the services, not just one.” So all the Beatles songs will be found on iTunes, Rhapsody, etc. That’s very “PC” of him!And those 13 remastered albums? They will not include “Hey Jude,” a 1969 compilation album that Americans of a certain age fondly recall and keep in their collections on vinyl only.Aspinall said he’d kind of forgotten about it.“Do you know that Allen Klein” — who represented Lennon back then in the U.S. — “screwed that up!" Aspinall said. "He reversed the photos. The back picture was supposed to be the cover!”