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May 30, 2007

music

The strange case of Paul McCartney’s iTunes catalog

Posted May. 30, ’07, 8:52 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Music

Paul McCartney pageUpdate: It’s 5:47PM on the East Coast, and there are now twenty six albums listed under Paul McCartney, both with and without Wings. Hurrah. No Fab Four, though.

We won’t be all iTunes all the time, I promise. But I thought it worth pointing out that updating the store seems to be a very gradual process. For example, consider this excerpt from this morning’s press release on iTunes Plus:

iTunes Plus is launching with EMI’s digital catalog of outstanding recordings, including singles and albums from Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Norah Jones, Frank Sinatra, Joss Stone, Pink Floyd, John Coltrane and more than a dozen of Paul McCartney’s classic albums available on iTunes for the first time. [Emphasis added]
Of course, we’d been hearing that Sir Paul’s catalog was iTunes-bound for a couple of weeks now—it’s already appeared on other download services, so we presumed the delay was so it would appear day-and-date with the DRM-free tracks. That seems to have been correct, but as of this writing, there’s a surprising lack of McCartney albums on iTunes. Above you’ll see the listing for McCartney’s album page. Don’t be deceived, though: two of those are listings for singles (the pre-order pages for his new album), and one is a compilation of 2007 Grammy Nominees, leaving just two full albums. This, despite the press release boast and the appearance of a Paul McCartney banner, reading “Catalog + Exclusives Just Added” in rotation on the front page of the iTunes Store.

A search for Paul McCartney doesn’t turn up anything additional. At least both of the full albums, Press to Play and Chaos and Creation, are available in DRM-free format. I presume we’ll see more McCartney albums rolled out throughout the day. I’d love to see Apple sneak in those Beatles guys too, though. That’d be a nice treat.


4 Comments

Robin said:

Band On The Run is available, even though it's not currently listed on the McCartney page. Weird. Other Macca titles will most likely roll out fairly shortly... any minute now...

May 30, 2007 10:51 AM
Anton said:

Sounds to me you are coming to a realisation what the artificial market segmentation in iTunes is about. I bet iTunes users in UK enjoy a larger collection of Macca's work. Mine has less than yours...

May 30, 2007 11:25 AM
agogddy said:

Great find! Thanks for posting this, that's my something new for today learnt.

---------------------------------
Free Download
http://www.onedownload.org

May 30, 2007 6:47 PM
Chad Billington said:

I can't get my library to upgrade. It tells me I've got 13 songs or so, I try to upgrade and then it tells me that I can't.

Weird.

May 30, 2007 7:00 PM

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