The Beatles on iTunes: a day “you’ll never forget”?

No question about it — snagging the rights to sell digital versions of the Beatles' classic catalog represents a major coup for Apple, and surely must be a source of personal satisfaction for Steve Jobs, a well-known Beatles fan who's been dropping hints about the Fab Four coming to iTunes for years.
It's a big deal for the music industry as well. The Beatles were among the very last of the digital-music holdouts. A few major acts — like AC/DC, Garth Brooks and Bob Seger (go figure) — are still refusing to go the MP3 way, but the Fab Four was arguably the biggest digital-music domino yet to fall.

But for the rest of us? Frankly, I wasn't losing any sleep over the fact that the Beatles weren't on iTunes yet, and I'm guessing I wasn't alone.
After all, it's safe to say that most big Beatles fans long ago ripped their entire collections of the Fab Four's music to MP3 for use on their iPods, Zunes, or other digital music players.
And for die-hard Beatles fans looking for the best sound quality, it'll be hard to beat the remastered Beatles CDs and box sets that came out last September — all of which, by the way, are available online for less than the digital tunes (or, to be more precise, the 256 Kbps AAC files) on sale through iTunes. The remastered CD of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," for example, is on sale for $8 on Amazon, versus $13 on iTunes.
Now, if Apple had simply posted its "The Beatles, now on iTunes" banner on its home page Tuesday, with no prior warning, the Beatles-on-iTunes news probably wouldn't have been such a letdown.
Instead, Apple decided to hype the announcement a bit, plastering a teaser on Apple.com Monday morning that read: "Tomorrow is just another day. That you'll never forget," adding that we should "check back" Tuesday for "an exciting announcement from iTunes."
So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the tech press (including, I'll admit, yours truly) and the Apple faithful jumped to some rather grand conclusions about what unforgettable thing might be on tap today.
Perhaps, we thought, the news would be something about all those rumors of a cloud-based iTunes — you know, a digital locker for all your music (and maybe even videos), stored and streamed from Apple's mammoth new data center in North Carolina.
Or, perhaps we'd be talking a music-subscription service, something along the lines of Rhapsody or Pandora. Besides, didn't Apple buy (and subsequently shutter) a music-streaming company called Lala late last year? And what about all that talk about Apple sniffing around Spotify, another popular online music site?
Those would've been some pretty big developments for iTunes — granted, perhaps too big to be announced with just a single day's notice.
Still, Apple was promising something we'd "never forget," right?
But dreams of iTunes in the sky or a subscription-based music service began to fade as Monday wore on, with All Things Digital's Peter Kafka pointing out that if Apple had indeed struck deals to stream tunes from the major music labels to iTunes users, his (well-placed) sources in the music industry certainly hadn't heard about it.
And the whole "Tomorrow is just another day" thing … isn't "Another Day" the title of a solo track from Paul McCartney? Yep, it sure is, and within hours, the cat was out of the bag.
While I'm probably not the only one who thinks that Apple way oversold its Beatles announcement Tuesday, there are still a few key benefits to finally having the Fab Four's albums available on iTunes.
1. For the first time ever (well, not counting old-school 45s, which came with "B" sides in any case), you can legitimately buy a single track of Beatles music. If, for example, you want to get "With a Little Help from My Friends" without having to pony up for the entire "Sgt. Pepper's" album, you're now free to do so, sacrilege or no.
2. A younger generation of music fans who've never even heard of (or don't really care about) John, Paul, George, and Ringo can now experience their tunes with a click of a button. (Assuming, of course, they haven't already done so through Pandora, which has been streaming Beatles songs for some time now, or using the dark magic of BitTorrent.)
3. You will never, ever, have to read another story speculating about when the Beatles will arrive on iTunes. (And I'll never have to write another post about Beatles-on-iTunes rumors, either.)
So, on a scale from 1 to 10, how big is Apple's news about the Beatles arriving on iTunes? Will you buy any Beatles albums online, or will you stick with the CDs?