LONDON: Apple Corps, the company that manages rights to The Beatles work, has settled a royalties dispute with the record label EMI Group, the two companies said Thursday, raising hopes that Beatles recordings may soon be legally available online.
"It was settled on mutually acceptable terms last month," Apple Corps and EMI said in a joint statement. They refused to provide details of the settlement.
Apple Corps launched legal action against EMI in 2005 to recover what the band said was more than 30 million, or about $60 million, in unpaid royalties. EMI releases Beatles recordings under the Apple label.
Founded in 1968 and still owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, Apple Corps is a zealous guardian of The Beatles interests.
In February, it settled a long-running trademark dispute with computer company Apple Inc. over the distinctive apple logo and name.
The Beatles have consistently refused to license their songs for music download sites, despite the desire of EMI to do so.
The legal settlement leaves EMI and Apple Corps free to negotiate a new royalties agreement that would include Internet sales.
Neither company would comment Thursday on whether such an agreement was imminent. At a news conference last week, however, the EMI chief executive Eric Nicoli said the company was seeking to make the Fab Four catalog available online.
"We re working on it, we hope it s soon," he said.
Apple Corps announced Monday that chief executive Neil Aspinall, 64, a friend of The Beatles for more than 40 years, was quitting. He was replaced by Jeff Jones, a former executive vice president at Sony BMG.
At the beginning of this month, EMI broke new ground in the digital music arena by announcing that is digital music catalogue would go on sale on Apple Inc. s iTunes online store without built-in copy restrictions, but that announcement was dampened by a European Commission announcement that both Apple Inc. and EMI were facing an antitrust investigation over the pricing of songs on iTunes.
EMI tracks without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software will be available at a higher fidelity and cost 30 percent more when sold as singles on iTunes. Music free of the software will cost $1.29, 1.
29 and 99 pence, depending on the location of the iTunes store. Consumers can also upgrade their existing iTunes tracks to a DRM-free state for 30 cents - dollars and euros - and 20 pence each.
Steve Jobs, the chairman of Apple, predicted that half of the five million songs in the iTunes music catalog would be sold without restrictions by the end of the year.
None of the other major record labels, which with EMI account for 70 percent of music sales, have yet said they would follow the move.
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