Despite the Beatles' foray into digital music with The Beatles: Rock Band video game, Yoko Ono says the Fab Four aren't any closer to digital music stores.
At a promotion for an upcoming public television documentary about John Lennon, Yoko Ono told Reuters that the Beatles’ Apple Corps. isn’t not close to making a deal with Apple Inc. about getting the Fab Four’s music on iTunes. “There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out,” Ono told Reuters. “Don’t hold your breath…for anything.”
The Beatles are one of the last remaining high-profile holdouts from the digital music marketplace, with record label EMI famously refusing to make the Beatles’ extensive catalog—and the myriad variations and remasters of it produced over the years—available to iTunes or other digital download stores. Hopes had been raised last year when Harmonix and MTV introduced The Beatles: Rock Band video game, which marked The Beatles’ first foray into digital media. The game also followed 2007′s conclusion to a high-profile trademark dispute between Apple Inc. and the Beatles’ Apple Corps, which had revealed Apple Corps was looking into making the Beatles’ music available online.
Since then, however, nothing has happened, and no one on the Beatles’ side of the fence has been very forthcoming about the state of any negotiations. In 2008, Paul McCartney indicated there were “a couple” of sticking points between Apple Inc. and Apple Corps; Ono indicates there is “an element” at the center of the impasse.
Ono was promoting LENNONNYC, an upcoming public television documentary that focuses on Lennon and Ono’s life together in New York during the 1970s.
