Beatle Maniacs

The BBC gave me a call this afternoon, asking for a quote they are doing about the prospect of Beatles songs invading the Top 40 now that the way is clear for them to be made available online for the first time. This I suspect was prompted by the story in the press (splashed on the front page of the Daily Mirror no less) speculating that we could potentially see an entire Top 10 – or more – made up of old Beatles songs. Some bookmakers are even offering odds on this event taking place.

So I told the reporter. Never going to happen.

Think it through. Whilst these songs have never been purchasable through legitimate online stores, it is not as if they have ever been unavailable anywhere else. Those owners of iPod’s or other mp3 players who were desperate for a copy of Love Me Do to listen to on their morning jog or whatever only had to pop down to their local shop and pick up a copy on CD. The last Beatles compilation, Number 1s sold millions of copies worldwide and chances are many of those have already been ripped to digital players.

So ask yourselves, just how big is the market for DRM crippled copies of songs which practically everyone who wants to hear them already owns in one form or another. To suggest that the entire chart will get dominated by them assumes that there is a huge pent up demand for the songs that will explode in a frenzy of downloading the minute they are put online. Add to that the fact that the entire Beatles catalogue is already online via my favourite download site allofmp3.com and you just can’t see the expected rush taking place.

Having said all the above that isn’t so say we can’t learn at least one lesson from history. These songs are after all some of the most famous pop records every made and quite rightly held up as defining moments of popular culture. Back in 1976 there was indeed a Beatles invasion as on the back of ‘Yesterday’ becoming a hit single for the first time ever, a slew of older Beatles singles were re-released. Many of them crept into the chart and spent March and April clogging up the bottom end of what was then a Top 50. Dig deep enough into press cuttings and you will find people at the time calling for a separate chart to be produced for Beatles records as they were getting in the way of newer music! These are songs to which the normal rules clearly do not apply. Magical things can happen when the Beatles are in town.

It isn’t to say there won’t be some sort of landrush the minute the songs come online. As the ‘Honey To The B’ experience shows, people are happy to behave like sheep if they are told that they can do something and it would be a really good idea to do so. I don’t rule out the possibility of seeing some of the biggest songs creeping briefly into the Top 20 or even the Top 10.

Whilst I reserve the right to be proved completely and spectacularly wrong, my confident prediction is that speculation about an entire Top 10 made up of the Beatles will ultimately prove to be way, way off the mark. This bunch of 40 year old songs is already owned by just about everyone who wants a copy, with everyone else not being particularly bothered either way.