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Beatles catalogue goes online. For about four minutes
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 7 January 2009
Of course a much bigger digital music story would be the arrival of the Beatles catalogue on iTunes or any other legit download platform – the Fab Four’s songs still not being officially available for download, mainly because of ongoing issues between the band’s own company Apple Corp and their record company EMI.
As Apple Computers made their DRM-free announcement in San Francisco yesterday, there was another announcement on the other side of the world that threatened to over shadow it. The Norwegian version of the BBC was putting podcasts online which contained whole Beatles tracks.
The podcasts were downloadable versions of a radio series NRK had broadcast back in 2001 in which journalists discussed, in depth, a Beatles track, and then it got played.
The radio show was being put online as part of NRK’s mission to make more of its archives available on the net, and not only did the move mean the Beatles were now available, seemingly legitimately, online, but the podcasts were free. Fans could download the Beatles catalogue legally for no krone, albeit with some Norwegian journalist rambling on about the music before it played.
I say “seemingly legitimately” because almost as soon as the news broke that these podcasts were going online the whole venture was brought to a stand still. NRK, it seemed, had failed to do even the most basic of homework.
The podcasts were being released under a podcast licence from Norwegian publishing royalty body TONO, which allows radio stations to include their member’s songs in podcasts providing the music makes up less than 70% of the overall output. All well and good.
Except that licence does not, of course, cover the recordings, just the songs. As we understand it, a call from the recording industry trade body the IFPI quickly followed, acting on behalf of EMI, and the podcasts were offline.
In fact, it turns out the podcasts didn’t even obey TONO’s rules regarding the inclusion of even the songs in the downloads, because the licence is designed to enable radio stations to offer a ‘listen again’ podcast service, and therefore podcasts can only be put online for up to four weeks after a show originally aired.
NRK Technology Adviser Oyvind Solstad told reporters: “We had a very good and open agreement with the Norwegian composers and people forgot that we need to have the same agreement with the record companies. We could have aired the whole thing and then podcast it, but I think the record company would have tried to stop it anyway”.
He added: “We want to share as much as possible of our archives with the public. We can’t do that if we can only podcast things that have been aired in the past four weeks. We need a better agreement. People’s media habits have changed, and young people want things on their ipods”, but admitted he didn’t expect any better agreement that allowed the release of the Beatles material via podcast. Given iTunes can’t even get permission to sell the songs, I doubt NRK will be allowed to give them away.
