Finally, Beatles join online revolution

Signaling an end to the highest-profile holdout in the booming digital-music arena, the Beatles are coming to the Internet. The band’s business arm, Apple Corps, has confirmed plans to digitally remaster the Beatles’ hit-filled catalog and then sell the songs individually online.

Don’t get out your wallet just yet, though. The Beatles’ work won’t be available any time soon, nor has it been decided which online stores will stock the tunes.

The group’s intentions were made public this week in written testimony by Apple Corps’ managing director, in the company’s trademark lawsuit against Apple Computer. In a statement to the High Court in London, Neil Aspinall acknowledged that “Hey Jude,” “Yesterday,” “Can’t Buy Me Love” and the others would, for the first time, be sold in digitally downloadable form upon completion of the remastering project.

“This is not imminent,” Apple Corps spokeswoman Elizabeth Freund cautioned Thursday. “The only thing we’re prepared to say is that we are indeed working on the masters. Where they’ll end up, or when, I don’t have that information.”

There were also hints in Aspinall’s statement that the remastering will result in new CD versions of the Beatles’ albums. “We’re remastering the whole Beatles catalog just to make it sound brighter and better, and getting proper booklets to go with each of the packages,” he said.

After years of foot-dragging along the sidelines of the digital frontier – an unsurprising move for a band that waited until the mid-1980s to convert its catalog to the CD format – the Beatles are shuffling into the online music market during a period of explosive growth.

With iPods and other MP3 players now outselling CD players, sales of downloaded songs are booming accordingly: Though U.S. sales of full-length albums were down 7.2 percent last year, the digital singles market grew by 150 percent, with 352.7 million individual songs sold online, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

There are some superstar holdouts such as Led Zeppelin, Metallica and Radiohead, but in recent months multiple big-name acts, including Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, have agreed to sell their full catalogs online. Most recently, the Dave Matthews Band announced a deal with Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store.