Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Apple Welcomes the Beatles to iTunes With a New Ad Campaign

The only real news about the Beatles’ long-awaited entry into iTunes: You can buy both albums and singles.

And Apple has an ad campaign cued up, of course.

If you’re the kind of person who keeps track of this stuff, you should note that the ads feature five songs:

  • “I Want to Hold Your Hand”
  • “All You Need Is Love”
  • “Let It Be”
  • “Yesterday”
  • “Here Comes the Sun”

And if you’re really keeping count, you’ll note that there are two “Paul songs,” one “John song,” one “George song” and one “Lennon-McCartney song.” Alas, no Ringo.

Everything else is pretty straightforward, and designed to please both completists and samplers: $149 gets you the entire Beatles box set that the band put out a year ago on CD, or you can pick and choose.

If you really want to gripe, here’s something: Apple (and/or the band) doesn’t know how to handle the mini-songs on the second half of “Abbey Road” and has made the silly decision to sell them as individual tracks.

So if you really want to hear all 23 seconds of “Her Majesty,” but you don’t want to buy the whole album, you’ve got to shell out $1.29. But whatever. Buy the whole album.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus