BlueBeat streaming and selling Beatles albums digitally
We have to admit, we’re baffled by this one. BlueBeat is a US-based site offering high-quality streams of full albums, as well as downloads for $0.25 a track. Its Facebook page promises to “stop the insanity of overpriced online music”, but it appears licensing deals aren’t on its agenda.
How do we know? Well, it’s streaming and selling the Beatles back catalogue for starters, with albums like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band available for $3.25 as MP3s. AC/DC albums are also being sold and streamed on the service – another digital refusenik.
BlueBeat is apparently a wholly-owned subsidiary of Media Rights Technologies, a Californian firm run by Hank Risan, chairman of the Museum of Musical Instruments. The site and company has been around for years in different forms, but its latest incarnation doesn’t seem to have aroused the wrath of the music industry.
Well, not yet, anyway. But if they went after Grooveshark (and on this side of the pond, AllOfMP3), we sense they may be firing off letters to BlueBeat soon too.
Tags: bluebeat
October 30th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stuart Dredge and Jennifer, Beatles. Beatles said: BlueBeat streaming and selling Beatles albums digitally – Music Ally (blog) http://bit.ly/3l8sQv #beatles [...]
October 30th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
[...] Não posso no entanto passar despercebido o aparecimento do BlueBeat, um site que permite ouvir álbuns completos em formato MP3 de 320 Kbps e adquirir o respectivo download por 25 cêntimos que eu descobri através da Music Ally. [...]
November 3rd, 2009 at 8:15 pm
[...] in which The Beatles’ music (legally) comes to the Internet? But it turns out that Apple was beaten to the punch by BlueBeat.com, which on October 30 began streaming unlimited plays from The Beatles’ [...]
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:21 pm
[...] in which The Beatles’ music (legally) comes to the Internet? But it turns out that Apple was beaten to the punch by BlueBeat.com, which on October 30 began streaming unlimited plays from The Beatles’ [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 10:37 am
[...] that it is suing US digital music store BlueBeat for copyright infringement, following news broken by Music Ally last week that it was selling Beatles albums as MP3s without a licence. However, intriguingly, EMI has also [...]
November 13th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
I just love the Beatles, have you tried out http://www.legal5ounds.com – you can download all their albums there!