Apple Corps Ltd: Beatles ready for downloading

Neil Aspinall, the head of Apple Corps Ltd. and the man who's protected The Beatles legacy for the last 40 years — told told FOXNews.com's Roger Friedman 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."

Friedman goes on to say that The Beatles digital albums will be released via several different digital music services, and not exclusively through iTunes.

...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.

The big question is whether or not Apple will announce a special edition Beatles iPod to commemorate the occasion. As much as I love the idea of a "Yellow Submarine" iPod it won't be a phone-less iPhone (iPod 6G) as many have hoped. Such a device would cannibalize iPhone sales too much. As I've said before, Apple won't release a phone-less iPhone until sales begin to stagnate. There's just too much revenue at stake for Apple to gamble with iPhone sales.

And if they do release a 5.5G Beatles iPod Apple may finally be able to pre-load the Beatles catalog. As commenter tic swayback pointed out in response to my Zune review yesterday:

"So far Apple has been unable to [pre-load iPods with content] due to their agreement with Apple Records. They were banned from selling physical copies of music. That's why when you buy a U2 iPod, you don't get the songs pre-loaded, you get a coupon to download them from the iTunes store. Now that there's a new agreement in place, I expect we'll be seeing a lot of pre-loaded iPods, starting with the rumored Beatles-based model."

As far as a line of yellow iPods are concerned, as much as I'd love to see one, Apple definitely has a bias against the color. But hey, at least the orange iPod shuffle is a step in the right direction.