EMI has shipped 5m remastered CD recordings by The Beatles to retail stores as it looks to the band that helped define the rock and roll album to stem the format's decline in the age of the single track download.
Pre-sales indicated that today's re-release of all 13 UK Beatles albums was on track to be “the biggest catalogue reissue ever conducted in the history of the music business”, Ernesto Schmitt, head of EMI's global catalogue business, told the Financial Times.
The first 50,000 box sets of mono versions of the recordings have sold out, at a price of $269. “That's a pretty courageous price point at a time when everybody wants music to be free,” Mr Schmitt said.