No EMI, no iTunes but Beatles back catalogue online from 15p

Those hoping for a Beatles on iTunes announcement at Apple's September music themed rock and roll event had to make do with Norah Jones, the antithesis of rock and roll.

Last week Santa Cruz, California-based website BlueBeat.com began selling The Beatles back catalogue without EMI's permission, with individual tracks, including 2009 Remasters, available for just 15p or 25 cents.

The MP3s are encoded at a lossy 160 Kbps, while the file's song information tags list "2009 BlueBeat.com" as the copyright holder.

Over 500 Beatles tracks are available on the BlueBeat.com site, ranging from the remastered albums to the 1996 Anthology collections.

It is known that EMI has investigated launching The Beatles' back catalogue digitally, perhaps from a dedicated website, although those plans appear still to be on hold.

Earlier this year on the eve of Apple introducing new iPods, John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono claimed surviving Beatles plus spouses had signed a deal with Apple and iTunes although that proved premature at best.

Ex-Beatle and multi-millionaire Sir Paul McCartney has previously expressed piracy concerns should The Beatles ever be made available digitally online. "If one [EMI] employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, 'Now you recompense us for that.' And they're scared of that," McCartney told The Observer newspaper.

Beatles piracy is of course not new. Self-styled electronics wizard and one time Beatles associate Magic Alex, aka Yanni Alexis Mardas, looked at ways back in the late 1960's, on the Fab Four's behalf, to prevent people taping vinyl records and recording songs from the radio.

"He [Mardas] had an idea to stop people taping our records off the radio -- you'd have to have a decoder to get the signal, and then we thought we could sell the time and put commercials on instead. We brought EMI and Capitol in from America to look at it, but they weren't interested at all," Ringo Starr said in The Beatles Anthology book.