Apple Inc will begin selling The Beatles’ songs through iTunes for the first time, ending an almost decade-long stalemate between the best-selling group and music’s largest retailer, two people familiar with the deal said.
Apple was expected to announce an agreement yesterday, said the people, who declined to be identified because the deal hasn’t been made public.
The absence of The Beatles has been the highest-profile hole in the catalog of Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs’ digital store. The band has kept its focus on physical media, even as a decline in compact discs sends other artists to the Internet. Formed about 50 years ago, The Beatles have remained a top-seller, with customers buying more than 30 million albums in the last decade, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, declined to comment. EMI Group Ltd, The Beatles’ record label, also declined to comment, said Dylan Jones, an EMI spokesman in New York.
Apple and The Beatles had been embroiled in a long-running legal feud. In 2007, Apple and The Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd, the entity that handles the Fab Four’s business affairs, settled a trademark dispute about the apple name and logo.
ITunes, introduced in 2001, is the largest destination for buying music in the US, bigger than Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Amazon.com Inc, according to NPD Group Inc.
The Beatles had the top-selling stand-alone album between 2000 and last year with their collection of greatest hits called 1, which sold 11.5 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The Beatles are the top-selling band in history, with more than 1 billion albums sold worldwide, according to London-based EMI.
The Beatles material has continued to find its way online as a popular target on illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, said Eric Garland, chief executive officer of BigChampagne, which tracks consumption of media online at authorized and unauthorized Web sites.
“For more than a decade, unauthorized copies of the entire Beatles catalog have been available and popular online, but your only legitimate option to buy the music was on CD,” Garland said.
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