As you may already know, Apple’s big iTunes-related announcement this morning had nothing to do with the iTunes update that went live over the weekend, which consisted largely of stronger implementation of its wireless AirPlay streaming and Twitter integration for Apple’s music-oriented social network, Ping (probably great news for the seven or eight people who actually use Ping but not exactly earthshaking for the rest of us). The most popular pre-announcement theory, that the Beatles catalog was finally going to be sold digitally—and that iTunes would be doing the honors exclusively, at least for a little while—turned out to be correct.
The Beatles acquisition was probably the least exciting of the rumors going around, especially since Apple still hasn’t done anything with Lala, the music-streaming service it acquired late last year, which could potentially revolutionize the iTunes experience. The response on music and tech blogs has largely been along the lines of “Who gives a shit?” The addition of an already ubiquitous band (whose albums any halfway educated BitTorrent user could find in downloadable form in seconds) isn’t a big deal, the argument goes. And seriously, how much longer are boomers going to keep insisting that they’re the center of the universe?
It’s a perspective I completely understand, but it misses one major point. Being able to buy the Beatles through iTunes might not mean much—pretty much everybody who wants the band’s music already has it on a hard drive somewhere, either thanks to BitTorrent or because, you know, you can import the songs from discs. But looked at from another angle, this could be a big deal. Steve Jobs may have just finally killed the CD.