Beatles Online Next Year

The catalogue of the Fabs will be available for legal download in ’08, McCartney says.

You can already legally download the solo work of John, Paul, George and Ringo. But getting your hands on the work they did together has meant going out and buying CDs (or holding on to that oldvinyl) – at least if you want to do it legally.   That will finally change in the next few months, according to an interview Sir Paul McCartney gave to Billboard.com.   EMI has seemingly been on the verge of making the Beatles’ work available for legal download for quite a while now, but hasn’t tippedover the edge. Finally, though, it seems that most of the problems have been solved, with only one point remaining.   "You’ve got to get these things right," McCartney said. "Youdon’t want to do something that’s as cool as that and in three years time you think, ‘Oh God, why did we do that?’"   McCartney expects the music to be available next year, and it willdoubtlessly spark a spur in downloading, especially from baby boomers. One of the problems has been a legal trademark dispute between Apple Corps with computer maker Apple, which was settled in February.