Beatles music podcast bid scuppered

6 January 2009 09:33pm

An attempt to put the entire Beatles back catalogue on the internet for free has been scuppered.

Norwegian national broadcaster NRK had begun posting 212 tracks online in a series of podcasts, with each song preceded by a three-minute talk about its history.

But the feat has been quashed as it breaches an agreement with rights holders.

NRK has an agreement with TONO, which owns rights to work by Norwegian artists, allowing the broadcaster to make all the material in its archive available in a podcast. However, the record company which owns the rights to the Beatles back catalogue, IFPI, has only allowed this for programmes aired in the last month.

As the Beatles material was broadcast in 2007, it is not eligible.

Technology adviser for NRK Oyvind Solstad said: "We had a very good and open agreement with the Norwegian composers and people forgot that we need to have the same agreement with the record companies.

"We could have aired the whole thing and then podcast it, but I think the record company would have tried to stop it anyway. There's something in the agreement where they can exclude certain artists."

NRK is a national broadcaster funded by a licence fee which is currently trying to open up decades of archives to the public.

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