TowerOne.com

According to British press reports, Sir Paul McCartney has sanctioned the release of the Beatles’ back catalogue on iTunes in a deal that is expected to bring in £200million (around $400million). With albums such as the White Album, Help! and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the catalogue is by far the biggest prize released for on the Internet and will surely dominate the download charts for some years.

The deal must have been a nightmare to pull together with rights to the catalogue owned across the surviving Beatles Sir Paul and Ringo Starr, the families of John Lennon and George Harrison, and through deals done in the past, EMI, Sony and Michael Jackson. A dispute between Apple and the Beatles’ original record label EMI over royalty payments was settled last year, paving the way for a download deal.

Good news for Sir Paul who is enduring the final throws of an expensive and acrimonious divorce with Heather Mills. Good news for Heather Mills  who will no doubt want to factor in future earnings somewhere in the settlement. Good news for MJ who is reportedly cash strapped. And finally good news for Apple who will no doubt see this as a further consolidation of the iTunes store as the webs premiere download facility.

Tags: Apple, Beatles, EMI, Sony

EMI has licensed Jamba to provide what the News Corp. and Verisign-owned mobile entertainment JV says is the label’s first DRM-free repertoire in Europe to cross both mobile and the PC, we’ve learned. Though tracks may not appear online for another couple of months, the deal was signed off late today. EMI is giving access to the copyright protection-free catalog it introduced almost a year ago now. Jamba Music will give customers MP3 files to the PC and the smaller, compressed AAC+ files to the mobile handset. Prices are not yet known.

Jamba Music is a music rental and purchase store, offered over both the desktop web and mobile, with synchronization of the music archive carried out over a data cable, Bluetooth or the net. It currently operates in Jamba’s native Germany though the outfit is keen to grow it through white-label deals with ISPs and in other countries this year. Previously, Jamba Music’s major-label repertoire had come in WMA format for PC but still AAC+ for mobile. Though Jamba claimed this deal is a European PC-and-mobile first for EMI, if you stretch it, you could say the iPhone/iTunes Store combination already offers DRM-free PC/mobile tunes.

Just as the labels have begun experimenting with DRM-free more generally, that notion is on some music industry lips in Barcelona. RealNetworks SVP Larry Moores told a session on the topic earlier today: “We’ve taken the dream and turned it in to a nightmare through DRM. Consumers expect their music to play everywhere. We’ll be offering DRM-free in some of our services this summer.” HP’s content, media and entertainment VP and CTO Brian Levy acknowledged DRM had posed serious problems but maintained artists had the right to earn money from protecting their wares.

Original Story

Tags: EMI, Jamba, News corp, Verisign

There are rumors circulating that Amazon mp3, the month old music download store, is already at number 3 in terms of dollar revenue, blowing competition away in its wake. If this is true, and early indications are that it is, Napster, Rhapsody and Wal-Mart may be dead in the water and the current number 2, eMusic, will be running to the bathroom.

Amazon mp3 is carving out a strong position and supported by the online presence of the mothership, it is offering music downloads at lower prices than iTunes and provides a tool to easily synch with iPods. None of the music is rights managed, a trend beginning to gain momentum in the industry with DRM free downloads now available from EMI and Universal Music.

It is difficult to see any option for incumbent services but to follow suit. Amazon has some way to go before Apple quake in their boots. iTunes handles approximately 70% of all US downloads.

Tags: Amazon, Apple, EMI, eMusic, Napster, Rhapsody, Universal Music, Wal-Mart