on jarod. he's obviously young and has no sense of history and those defining moments in culture and society. it's all about the NOW with this group. no sense of how it all relates.

fruit flies anyone?

I always felt the Beatles were little more than an overrated boy band. Their best songs were ones they didn't write, and quite frankly, their later drug-induced stuff is just painful to listen to. I'm not even going to talk about their movies.

I understand the impact they made on our culture, but there's much better music from the 60s and 70s than what the Beatles put out. That said, I do like George Harrison's solo music.

Lennon and McCartney have secured their places in the history of music. Even the most stodgy of music schools of today (the ones that study classical music, from Bach, through Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Stravinsky...) have added some works of Lennon-McCartney to their required reading. The guys were incredibly gifted musically and we analyze several of their pieces (harmony, form, structure, voicings, George Martin's arrangements) with fascination. The only other composer of contemporary music that gets mentioned and studied in classical music schools is John Coltrane (the jazz musician).

If Apple Corp. continues to drag its feet about allowing the works to be re-issued digitally, it will eventually lapse into public domain, and they won't make a dime on it.

first of all, there were no "Beatles" in the 70's. so any comparison is a moot point.
saying there is "better" is subjective. again, not the point. everybody has their own taste.

when you listen to what other music was being made at the same time then you put it in perspective and see their brilliance. their music experimentation was inspirational to everything that followed.

it's the same with dylan. you look at bringing it all back home and highway 61 revisted and realize that sam the sham and the pharaoh's was his contemporaries you start to see the brilliance. doesn't matter if you like him or not, the astounding direction he took was visionary and led the way to more artistic expression in pop music culture.

Beatles' music can be found online extremely easily for free. They are missing out on the potential revenue everyday they are not on iTunes.

that the rock band release isn't planned to actually occur until the end of 2009, there's still quite a lot of time for them to debut on iTunes first.

it's been said repeatedly that they've been remastering the albums for rerelease, and that legal online availability was only a matter of that happening.