Beatles Apple

4th
NOV

Beatles Apple

Posted by watertree under IT

Apple Corps (the Beatles Apple, wiki), and EMI will be held November 7-8 in the United Kingdom the United States limited edition 30000 digital apple. Figure, this is only the stalk is a Green Apple 16G flash drive. Which of course, there are high-quality Beatles songs, live recording, small films, price 279.99 U.S. dollars.

Connect Beatles Link

Following the September 9 (9-9-09) debut of The Beatles’ digitally re-mastered catalogue on CD, Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music are pleased to announce the worldwide release of a limited edition of only 30,000 Beatles Stereo USB apples on December 7 (December 8 in North America).

The exquisitely crafted, apple-shaped USB drive is loaded with the critically acclaimed re-mastered audio for The Beatles’ 14 stereo titles, as well as all of the re-mastered CDs’ visual elements, including 13 mini-documentary films about the studio albums, replicated original UK album art, rare photos and expanded liner notes.

A specially designed Flash interface has been installed, and the 16GB USB’s audio and visual contents will be provided in FLAC 44.1 Khz 24 bit and MP3 320 Kbps formats, fully compatible with PC and Mac.

You can pre-order your copy in the official Beatles store on the “STORE” link above.

beatles-apple

Formation

The Beatles’ accountants had informed the group that they had a large amount of capital which they could either invest in a business venture or else lose to the Inland Revenue. According to Peter Brown, personal assistant to Beatles manager Brian Epstein, activities to find tax shelters for the income that The Beatles generated began as early as 1963-64 when a Dr Strach was put in charge of such operations.[1] First steps into that direction were the foundation of Beatles, Ltd. and in early 1967 Beatles and Co. which later evolved into Apple.

John Lennon remembered it like this:

Our accountant came up and said ‘We got this amount of money. Do you want to give it to the government or do something with it?’ So we decided to play businessmen for a bit because we’ve got to run our own affairs now. So we’ve got this thing called ‘Apple’ which is going to be records, films, and electronics – which all tie up.

Writes Stefan Granados in Those Were the Days: An Unofficial History of the “Beatles” Apple Organization 1967-2001 on the various processes that lead to the formation of Apple Corps:

The first step towards creating this new business structure was to form a new partnership called Beatles and Co. in April 1967. To all intents and purposes, Beatles and Co. was an updated version on The Beatles’ original partnership, Beatles Ltd. Under the new arrangement, however, each Beatle would own 5% of Beatles and Co. and a new corporation owned collectively by the four Beatles (which would soon be known as Apple) would be given control of the remaining 80% of Beatles and Co. With the exception of individual songwriting royalties, which would still be paid directly to the writer or writers of a particular song, all of the money earned by the Beatles as a group would go directly to Beatles and Co. and would thus be taxed at a far lower corporate tax rate.

Now that a new business structure was found with a lower tax rate, The Beatles’s manager Epstein mused what to do with it in order to justify it to the authorities, and originally thought of it mostly as a merchandising company, as according to Lennon’s first wife Cynthia: “The idea Brian came up with was a company called Apple. His idea was to plough their money into a chain of shops not unlike Woolworth’s in concept – Apple boutiques, Apple posters, Apple records. Brian needed an outlet for his boundless energy.” Personal assistant to Epstein, Alistair Taylor relates it a bit more in detail:

We set up an ‘Executive Board’ of Apple before Brian died, including Brian, the accountant, a solicitor, Neil Aspinall, myself, and then sat down to work out ways of spending the money. One big idea was to set up a chain of shops designed only to sell cards; birthday cards, Christmas cards, anniversary cards. When the boys heard about that they all condemned the scheme as the most boring yet. Sure that they could come up with much better brainwaves, they began to get involved themselves.

In the middle of setting up the new company, manager Epstein died unexpectedly in what seemed an accidental sleeping pills overdose on August 27 1967, which pressed The Beatles to accelerate their plans to gain control of their own financial affairs. In addition to providing an umbrella to cover the Beatles’ own financial and business affairs, Apple was intended to provide a means of financial support to anyone in the wider world struggling to get ‘worthwhile’ artistic projects off the ground. According to Granados, this idea probably first originated with Paul McCartney as the Beatle most engaged in London’s local avant-garde scene, “McCartney was among the best-known exponents of swinging London”.

McCartney at first had obviously intended to use Epstein’s music publishing company NEMS Enterprises for these plans, but after Epstein’s death it became apparent that Australian Robert Stigwood was trying to get hold of NEMS, only to control The Beatles and get a hand in their profits. None of The Beatles themselves favored such an outcome, as McCartney had previously told Epstein in 1967: “We said, ‘In fact, if you do, if you somehow manage to pull this off, we can promise you one thing. We will record God Save the Queen for every single record we make from now on and we’ll sing it out of tune. That’s a promise. So if this guy buys us, that’s what he’s buying.” They hurried to set up Apple instead, and seeing that The Beatles would not be part of the NEMS package, Stigwood went to form his own company, RSO Records.

By this time, also the company name originated with McCartney, coming from a René Magritte painting he’d acquired; ‘Apple “Core” (Corps)’ was a play on words all the Beatles enjoyed. The ubiquitous logo was designed by Gene Mahon, with illustrator Alan Aldridge transcribing the copyright notice to appear on record releases. John Lennon and McCartney introduced their new business concept on a press conference held on May 14, 1968 in New York City:

Lennon: “It’s a company we’re setting up, involving records, films, and electronics, and – as a sideline – manufacturing or whatever. We want to set up a system where people who just want to make a film about anything, don’t have to go on their knees in somebody’s office. Probably yours.”Said McCartney:”It’s just trying to mix business with enjoyment. We’re in the happy position of not needing any more money. So for the first time, the bosses aren’t in it for profit. We’ve already bought all our dreams. We want to share that possibility with others.”

McCartney pitched it to the world’s media as an attempt at ‘Western Communism’: “A beautiful place where you can buy beautiful things… a controlled weirdness… a kind of Western communism.”