Lennon’s music to rock iTunes

Apple Inc. has introduced a reason for fans of the Beatles to rejoice by including sixteen albums of the legendary John Lennon in its iTunes music store. He is the third of the fab four to have his solo work digitally available. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have already made their digital debuts.

Sixteen solo albums of John Lennon from EMI group can be downloaded now, including the "Lennon Legend" and "Acoustic" collections, which make their first worldwide digital introduction.

The prices have been settled at 99 cents a pop or as little as $9.99 for an entire album. For the DRM, one can spend the extra 30 cents per song for the high quality 256 Kbps AAC encoding.

“Pity poor John Lennon. He didn't get to see the fruits of his solo career uploaded to the digital frontier for a new generation of listeners,” said John’s Widow, Yoko Ono in a statement on Tuesday adding that he would have loved to see his music available in a format that suits the new generation.

According to EMI, all the band's members, with the exception of Harrison, have made some of their solo works available digitally, but not through iTunes until recently.

Harrison's widow, Olivia Harrison a few months ago said about the Beatles’ catalogue being available online, “I don't know if it would be the end of this year, but it would be nice. Imminent, let's put it that way.”

Sir Paul McCartney released his solo and Wings catalog to the Apple download store back in May. Though Apple did not say when the entire Beatles catalog would be released, the recent event has definitely brought it closer to fruition.

For a limited period of 30 days, exclusive video content will be included with the albums ‘John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’, 'Sometime in New York City’, ‘Walls and Bridges’, ‘Milk and Honey’ and the collections ‘Anthology’ and ‘Working Class Hero.’

Geoff Mayfield, director of charts at trade magazine Billboard, said Apple’s release of the Beatles catalog has been highly anticipated but getting approval from the band's two surviving members as well as the estates of Harrison and Lennon has been tough.

The organization of one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed bands ever, has conventionally been conservative towards new technology.