The Beatles land on iTunes - 99p a track

Happiness is a warm AAC
Happiness is a warm AAC

It's official: The Beatles are coming to iTunes for the very first time, with their entire back catalogue being made available to users of the music store.

The albums have popped on to iTunes, with tracks available for 99p a pop and double albums (like The White Album) priced at a whopping £18.

Currently if you want to purchase The White Album (CD) on Amazon, you will be paying just £12.99.

Single albums are priced at £10.99 and there is a boxset which will cost you £125.

The boxset contains the 13 remastered studio albums with iTunes LPs and mini doc Past Masters and the Live at the Washington Coliseum, 1964 concert film.

The Live at the Washington Coliseum, will also be streamed on iTunes for free for the remainder of the year.

This announcement was meant to happen at 3pm UK time, but somebody from Apple decided to put up the back catalogue early on to iTunes.

Come Together

It's taken years for EMI and Apple to see eye to eye over selling The Beatles' albums over iTunes but - after an extremely short teaser this week - an agreement has been reached and the Fab Four's music will be available digitally to all, via iTunes, just in time for the Christmas charts.

It was originally thought the The Beatles would come to iTunes after the Apple, Inc (Jobs and co) and Apple Corps (The Beatles' record label) dispute ended in 2007.

It wasn't until 2008, however, that both parties were close to making a deal.

Paul McCartney said at the time that talks 'had stalled'. He did explain, though: "I really hope it will happen because I think it should."

It's taken two more years for talks to resume and the albums to hit iTunes.

During this time, MTV and EA stole some of Apple's thunder by releasing The Beatles: Rock Band – a game supported by the remaining members of the band and included a number of The Beatles' songs.

Regardless, having The Beatles on iTunes is a major coup for Apple, and puts to rest many years of rumour and speculation.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.