Is This Significant?: The Beatles Catalog Is Being Remastered

A reissued Beatles catalogue: It's still fun to watch Paul McCartney — seen here at the Grammys in February. But is it worth buying whole new Beatles albums? Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

 

by Marc Hirsh

Just announced: The entire Beatles catalogue is set to be remastered and reissued, with original and new liner notes, plus documentaries about each album, on Sept. 9.

We delve into the question: Is this significant?

How old the current recordings are, the tie to Rock Band, and more, after the jump...

Why It Is: Aside from some scrubbing on the songs that made the cut for 2000's 1 compilation, there haven't been any sonic improvements to the Beatles catalog since it was originally brought into the digital age more than 20 years ago.

That means the brand-new copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band currently sitting in the racks at the local CD store you've been avoiding is essentially the same recording you could have purchased in 1987.

Considering how drastically the way we listen to music has changed since then — in both the formats and the increased reliance on headphones, earbuds and the like — the argument that material should be remastered for each new playback technology isn't purely the nerdery of audiophiles.

Why It Isn't: Lord knows consumers are wary of being asked to repurchase music that they already own. At a recent Boston event, music writer Chuck Klosterman argued that part of the reason for the current implosion of the recording industry is that it was artificially inflated for the past two decades for this very reason.

Every day, there's another press release touting one reissue or another, and most of the time, it's little more than an attempt to grab some attention for an artist that's slipping from the spotlight due to inactivity or changing tastes. Rolling out the Beatles catalog again sure sounds like somebody is banking that a sure thing will generate some cash for a beleaguered industry.

The final verdict: Significant. Despite boy-who-cried-wolf fatigue (and the muddling-things fact that there will be additional collections, including mono versions of albums originally released in mono), it's hard to ignore the fact that we're currently listening to the Beatles in sonics that were state-of-the-art when Reagan was President.

And this isn't just a lone reissue. With the Beatles' Rock Band game arriving at around the same time, and rumblings of an impending deal to make the band's catalog available on iTunes, there's no better time to make sure that the songs sound the best they can in whatever form people will hear them from now on.

That doesn't make this reissue the capital-e Event that the publicists would like the press to believe it is. But it does provide actual, real justification for the remastering job — justification that goes well beyond "It seemed like it was about time."

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