The Beatles back-catalogue has famously failed to make its way to digital music stores, but it seems that at least one of the former Beatles has no qualms with taking his material online. It was announced this week that Paul McCartney would be working with HP to digitise his entire body of work and host it on the internet.
The collection will include master copies of his songs as well as images, artwork, paintings, films and videos from his prolific post-Beatles career. The computer-manufacturer will then work to build and design a state-of-the-art content management system to host all of the media, which will be available in a "private cloud environment".
Some of this material will then be made available to the public, though it appears that the exercise is primarily designed to preserve McCartney's large collection.
The musician explained that "I've always been interested in creative ideas and new ways of reaching people, so this is a really exciting initiative for me," adding that "I hope it will allow people who might be interested to access parts of our archives they might otherwise not be able to".
We support the idea of hosting McCartney's vast archives online, and are interested to see how the content is used and presented, as well as what will be made available to the public. He undoubtedly has a unique collection that should be both preserved for the future and made available to as wide an audience as possible.
Unfortunately, though, it looks like we're still no closer to seeing The Beatles' collection officially brought to the internet.
