It's Time to Open-Source The Beatles

While I greatly enjoyed the Love show in Las Vegas, I don't think the music got to seep in as much as I would have liked. With the release last week of the show's soundtrack, I've had a chance to listen a lot more closely. Quite simply, the soundtrack is absolutely wonderful.

The most remarkable thing about it is that they even made "Within You Without You" interesting, and it's now one of my favorite songs. That is a remix. I got a MacBook Pro last week, and I'm very excited about it; but I don't think I will get as much enjoyment from this computer as I will get from listening to songs that I know better than any sound in the world combined in new and truly inventive ways. These songs have never sounded better, and the 5.1 mix is overdue but worth the wait.

Some great mixes have come out of this. The Black Album showed how the wide sonic variety in The Beatles' work provides a rich canvas for remix artists to work with. But for The Beatles to truly innovate one more time, they should go open-source. Make their individual tracks - or mixed but distinct versions of the individual tracks - open and available in common formats such as GarageBand and Pro Tools. They wouldn't be the first - I know that Nine Inch Nails and Peter Gabriel have successfully taken similar steps - but they could open the concept of the mashup up to a much wider audience.

Paul McCartney has always talked about how The Beatles' music should not become museum pieces; that's why he remade some Beatles tracks in the early eighties. Open-sourcing their recordings would make the most important music of the twentieth century available to the public domain.

This is purely naive and there's way too much money in The Beatles to expect it to ever happen, it just struck me as something that would be cool.

Luckily, it seems that The Beatles are talking to the other Apple, and it's likely that the band will end up on iTunes, possibly exclusively for a short period. These two are made for each other; they should get over their differences and make each other some cash. I remember hearing that they would not be on any download service until the entire catalog was remixed. If Love is any indication, that's a good thing. The annoying "too loud tambourine" condition is completely absent in these incredible new mixes.