Back during the 2008 Macworld Convention in San Francisco, I made friends with a guy named JC, who turned out to be the Apple iTunes Content Quality Czar. Once he told me his title at Apple, my first question was about the Beatles and iTunes: our meeting was just on the heels of Apple and the Beatles settling their infamous logo issue, and he assured me that their song catalogue would be up on iTunes “sometime in 2008.” That was two years ago, and still no progress has been made to add the most influential pop group of the 20th century to the world’s most relevant music retail repository. For a long while, other highly influential acts, like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Radiohead, were also holdouts from iTunes. But at the beginning of 2010, only the Beatles remain absent from the ubiquitous iTunes music inventory, and recent comments by the executors of the Beatles brand show no immediate signs of joining the roster.

Continue reading ‘"We Can Work It Out?" 2009 Passes, Still No Beatles on iTunes’