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.

This non-update comes from Yoko Ono, who should know, since she’s one of the four people with control of the band’s catalog.

She says Apple Corps, the band’s holding company, would like to sell Beatles music through Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes one day. But that day won’t be soon. Reuters:

“[Apple CEO] Steve Jobs has his own idea and he’s a brilliant guy,” Ono, the 77-year-old widow of John Lennon, told Reuters. “There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out.

“Don’t hold your breath…for anything,” she said with a laugh.

Ono, who was promoting an upcoming public television documentary about her husband, “LENNONYC,” declined to go into detail. Former member Paul McCartney was similarly vague in 2008 when he said there were “a couple of sticking points.”

What are those sticking points? Who knows–and who cares, really, at this point? For the record, let’s note that Apple Records is going to release music from other bands on iTunes this fall. And one day, I’m sure, they’ll get around to the Beatles stuff, too.

In the meantime, if you want to get the Beatles online, they’re a Google (GOOG) search away. As always, I’d suggest starting with YouTube:

And who knows? It may even be true. But here’s one bit of nuance to chew on: Magazine mogul Jann Wenner has made money–as in, a profit–on the Web for the last five years.

How so? By licensing Rollingstone.com to RealNetworks (RNWK) and letting that company bear almost all the costs of running the site. True, the site didn’t blow anyone away. But it has generated cash. I’m told the RealNetworks deal is worth “several” millions in profit per year.

That kind of performance wouldn’t be very meaningful for a title owned by a big public company like Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc., where it would be important to show Wall Street that you’ve harnessed the power of the Web and turned it into your own personal growth engine.

But for Wenner’s privately held company, which owns all of three titles, a few million bucks a year in profit is a few million bucks a year in profit. And that profit has come in handy the last couple of years, when the Internet growth engine has turned out to have problems of its own.

Let’s be clear: Wenner’s cautious, cash-flow-positive strategy has now left Rolling Stone far behind everyone else on the Web when it comes to market share. Which is why I’d suggest that his company not try to replicate its print strategy–which aims to straddle an uneasy line between modern pop culture (“The Hills”!) and golden oldies (“The Beatles”!)–and forgo the idea of becoming “The Rolling Stone of Web.”

Even if Wenner had tried this years ago, I don’t think it would have worked; the Web is too diffuse and pop culture tastes too fractured for any single site to gain the kind of traction that his magazine got during its heyday. And if any site does have that power, it’s Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, and no one’s going to displace that now.

My two cents: Turn RollingStone.com into an amazing online archive that capitalizes on the magazine’s glory years, when it really was the hub for popular culture. The magazine should have a treasure trove of stuff at its fingertips–interviews, articles, photos,  etc.–but you’d be hard pressed to find any of it on the site now.

Take the interviews that Wenner himself conducted with John Lennon and other luminaries, for example: Great stuff. But if you’re looking for, say,  Wenner’s 1970 interview with Lennon, you can’t find them on his own site. You’ll have to look over on…YouTube.

It should be relatively easy, and inexpensive, to cull this stuff, make it searchable, figure out ways to recycle, repackage, and redistribute it, right? It won’t necessarily do blockbuster numbers, but it won’t cost much, either. Get lucky, and you could even turn a profit.

Microsoft, who kicked off E3 Monday morning, set a high bar this year with a media briefing that was preceded by a mysterious email the day before. That email stated that the event would start five minutes early “due to a very special addition.”

Its special surprise guests turned out to be the Beatles’ Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, as well as the spouses of the late John Lennon and George Harrison, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison. All showed up to promote the much anticipated “The Beatles Rockband” music simulation game by MTV Games, in which users can pretend to be members of famed music group.

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OK, we Photoshopped it, but only because we could not get our head around what the official Yahoo/Microsoft post-merger picture might look like.

With news that the pair were in informal talks, first broken by CNET, Boomtown still could not conceive of Yahoo (YHOO) CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang trading high-fives with Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, given Yang has thus far behaved as if the unsolicited bid from the software giant was akin to eating a bowl of worms.

But, in the words of the immortal John Lennon, “Imagine all the people/Living life in peace.” Thus we took that famous picture of AOL’s Steve Case and Time Warner’s (TWX) Jerry Levin (they seemed so happy at the time–who knew?) at the dawn of that dog of a merger and went to town.

BoomTown has always been an avid student of those always curious post-acquisition/merger shots that get taken as the first public visual expression of a deal.

For example, the genuine one, pictured below, of the Bebo/AOL union announced yesterday, with Bebo president Joanna Shields shaking hands with AOL CEO Randy Falco, while AOL President Ron Grant stands nearby, seems unusually awkward and uncomfortable to me, for example.

Is a picture worth a thousand words or are looks deceiving? You decide.

With their trademark dispute over the “Apple” brand finally settled and the solo work of Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney already for sale on iTunes, Apple (AAPL) and the Beatles’ Apple Corps. are rumored to be negotiating a business alliance that will bring the Fab Four’s remastered back catalog to the digital music store–for a sum of as much as $600 million.

Reports of the deal have the Beatles’ back catalog arriving on iTunes “within months,” perhaps even accompanied by a special edition “Yellow Submarine” iPod. That said, they should all be taken with a grain of salt–if not an entire salt flat. Apple has already dismissed them as “unsubstantiated speculation.” “This is not news, nor is it a scoop,” an Apple spokesman told Billboard.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Discussing a potential iTunes deal with Billboard.com last November, McCartney said “it’s down to fine-tuning, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be happening next year, 2008.”