I was also pondering how many Beatle fans don't already have everything on Vinyl and Cassette.

Then something rather obvious occurred to me

I have some of their stuff on tape. I never play it for various reasons; mostly not owning a tape deck that's actually plugged in. There's maybe 5 tracks I absolutely love. If they were available for download anywhere else but iTunes, I'd buy them tomorrow.

The two Beatles talents are dead. The surviving two kind of came along for the ride, IMO. McCartney has proven time and time again that he needs the acid wit of Lennon to make his songs work - on his own, he produces a lot of reasonably good lyrics, but they are just too “cute”. I’m not sure what Starr has done of any worth, other than to say “peace and love” a lot.

Harrison was undervalued in the Beatles - but he had a good solo career, as well as teaming up with a few chums under the guise of the Travelling Wilburys.

As a team - a group of four blokes with instruments, they worked well, and produced some rather special music, as well as being at the forefront of pioneering recording. I think a lot of people forget that the Beatles were very experimental in the studio and did stuff that was very, very new which today is taken for granted. The 1960’s (certainly the latter half) saw some very experimental music - not just from The Beatles, but from Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, and many others. The Beatles were at the bleeding edge of it.

Today, though, I am not convinced that them being on iTunes is as huge as Apple would like you to think. The word “finally” crossed my mind, but if you were one of those people who waiting 8 years for them to appear so you could own digital copies of their music, then I question your sanity. By now, if you are going to own Beatles music, you’ll have it on CD or vinyl (and it turns out that it’s still cheaper to buy CDs of Beatles music than it is to download from iTunes).

Okay, I've already said I'm a fan. Let me expand on that.

My parents were emphatically not Beatles fans. I grew up in a house without any Beatles records at all. My only exposure to their music was via the wireless or the telly. A couple of years ago I decided I wanted to add the Beatles to my own music collection. Rather than dip in and out selecting albums or collections of tracks, I decided to start from the very beginning with their first album and work in chronological order.

I put myself, I suppose, in a similar position to someone discovering the Beatles in 1963. Listening to each album in turn, right through several times, I could see what influenced the Fab Four, and how they evolved and moved on. I could sort of understand how their rock and roll/blues style of the early stuff would have sounded very new and exciting to an audience still hearing the greats of the 1950s, like Presley and Holly. The Beatles really broke the mould formed by the 1950s style of rock and roll.

To me, hearing the whole album, as if for the first time, made much more sense than random selections of their best bits. It becomes easy to spot songs that are by individual members of the band, or those perhaps more famous ones penned by Lennon and McCartney. How the individuals merged to form the Beatles "sound" was an interesting journey. Don't judge the music or their influence on just the famous hits that still get airtime today.

I still understand why some people dislike their music, but I wonder if that's because the more famous songs are heard out of context.

Beatles on iTunes: Here's why it matters

My colleague and esteemed virtual mate Gary Marshall asks why we should be bothered about The Beatles appearing on iTunes. He thinks it doesn't really matter.

But he's wrong.

If you're a real fan, you may well have all the fab four's music on vinyl and cassette, on CD and remastered CD. You've probably also got a lock of Ringo's hair in a tin and a piece of toast that Jane Asher once looked at.

But The Beatles are a special case that transcends conventional fandom. They are part of the fabric of musical history and of popular culture. This release is not really for fans - it's for everyone else.

It's for you and your mum and your kids. Everyone who's ever thought, "I fancy listening to that long chord at the end of A Day in the Life" or who wanted to put on Yellow Submarine to placate a toddler's tantrum.

It's for everyone who felt like vaccing the living room to She Loves You, but who couldn't download a copy the same way they can download Britney or Kylie or Queen.

New context

In this digital era, you can't look at The Beatles in their original context - as an album band from the black and white days. This is a different time, where people no longer buy albums. But isn't that the point?

Because instead of buying albums, folks download single tracks now for 99p a pop. And this is the first time you've been able to do that with a Beatles song. A peerless back catalogue that transcends its time and origin. That's a pretty big deal.

It's not just old people that like and listen to these songs either. A quick look at Last.FM statistics shows that the biggest fans of The Beatles are still the kids, scrobbling playlists as they shake their heads and play air guitar to Twist and Shout.

Flawed argument

There is an argument that anyone who's been waiting for a digital copy of The White Album could have torrented it a long time ago.

Well, you could say that about any single artist, couldn't you? It's like asking, "What's the point in iTunes? What's the point in paying for music?" It's like saying, "What's the point in paying for that cheese when I could have just put it in my bag?"

People do pay to download music. Millions of them, every year. Some of them even pay for music they could have pirated for free.

There's a much bigger significance to The Beatles on iTunes, though. The CD format has always been more functional than popular, a transition between vinyl and virtual that is now coming to the end of its life.

This is about much more than a band and a download service. It's about a tipping point. It's about the end of tapes and discs and the mainstreaming of bits and bytes. The Beatles on iTunes sends a clear message. These are the last days of the compact disc.

And we won't mourn its passing, because The Beatles are back.

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing ... z15fZWAxfo

What a load of unmitigated b0llocks

It is only the death of the CD because there is not much worth buying on CD now. I still buy compilations as they offer great value. I still want the Beatles on CD. iTunes is irrelevant for the Beatles.

Hang on a minute..........when did Ringo get shot?

Bit like Marmite then....