Music Ally

EMI has announced that the Beatle’s back catalogue has now been digitally remastered, for a swathe of re-releases on 9 September – tying in with the release of console game The Beatles: Rock Band. However, at this time, those reissues are CD-only rather than digital, as longstanding negotiations over the latter rumble on.

A new incentive to sort that out has been provided by BigChampagne, which reports that 23% of P2P users download one or more Beatles tracks – around 14.26 million people. “The annual total [of illegal Beatles downloads] is in the many tens of millions, perhaps 100 million,” says CEO Eric Garland.

We’re wondering whether Beatles tracks will be downloadable to their official Rock Band game, actually. Estimates vary as to how many songs the band recorded – 214 seems to be a popular number from our hasty search of online wikis diligent research. They surely won’t all be included in the boxed game, so it’ll be interesting to see if the full catalogue is made available for download there.

Then again, that’s a heap of work for the game’s developer, Harmonix, so maybe they’re just focusing on the popular stuff.

Tags: Beatles, P2P, Rock Band

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