September 2009 is shaping up to be quite a month for the Beatles fans. Besides the release of the widely anticipated video game "The Beatles: Rock Band", during the same month Apple and EMI will launch the original Beatles catalogue, which has been digitally re-mastered for the first time.
The collection will include all 12 Beatles albums in stereo, with track listings and artwork as originally released in the UK, and 'Magical Mystery Tour,' which became part of The Beatles' core catalogue when the CDs were first released in 1987.
The collections "Past Masters Vol. I and II," including singles, out-takes, live versions and B-sides which weren't on the albums, will be reissued in one package. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. On the same date, two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released.
The albums have been re-mastered by a dedicated team of engineers at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London over a four year period utilising state of the art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment, carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings.
In addition, the collections 'Past Masters Vol. I and II' are now combined as one title, for a total of 14 titles over 16 discs. This will mark the first time that the first four Beatles albums will be available in stereo in their entirety on compact disc. These 14 albums, along with a DVD collection of the documentaries, will also be available for purchase together in a stereo boxed set.
In a press statement, Apple and EMI said that the discussions about the digital distribution of the catalogue will continue.In the past few years, the US computer company Apple has held talks with EMI to release the Beatles catalogue through iTunes.
In the last two years, iTunes has become the digital distributor for the solo works of George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and John Lennon.
In November last year, Paul McCartney said that an agreement was yet to be reached between EMI and The Beatles, rearding the distribution through iTunes. He told the media: “This is constantly being talked of – we’d like to do it. What happens is, when something’s as big as The Beatles, it’s heavy negotiations.”
Maybe the release of the digitally re-mastered catalogue could be a hint that the Beatles songs will be available through iTunes until the end of this year, as it was already rumored.
