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Imagine John Lennon On iTunes

It's easy if you try... Now Lennon and Beatles fans can wake up from their Number 9 Dream and sing out in unison: "All we are saying... is do you take checks or cash?"

(For optimum effect while reading this, play the video)

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. At least that's what Yoko Ono said in a statement on Tuesday.

Sixteen of Lennon's solo albums are now available on Apple's iTunes Music Store for 99 cents a pop or as little as $9.99 for an entire album. For the DRM conscious, you can spend the extra 30 cents per song for the high -quality 256 Kbps AAC encoding. The event brings the entire Beatles catalog closer to fruition. Sir Paul McCartney released his solo and Wings catalog to the Apple download store back in May.

Hint to EMI and Steve Jobs ... George and Ringo have very extensive and popular discographies as well.

Because Lennon is popular, IT managers and network admins may want to hunker down and either dedicate extra bandwidth on the network or restrict access to iTunes. And if you are a real Blue Meanie, you can even disable the application on the Mac.

Included in the Lennon solo album list are the debuts of "Lennon Legend" and "Acoustic" collections in digital format. Apple also is offering exclusive video connected 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" for the next 30 days.

When I heard the news today (oh, boy), at first I was excited, then depressed, then angry, and then excited again. In the news blurb from Apple, the company stressed the whole idea of iTunes Plus, offering DRM-free music tracks for 30 cents more than regular tracks. I thought to myself that if Apple, EMI, and Yoko were only going to release the solo work in DRM-free format that it was pure greed.

Fortunately, that is not the case. You can buy most any song for 99 cents. That seems very fair. Not everyone is an audiophile or ventures outside the Mac platform.

I already have a few of the albums, which I've loaded into my iPod. And it brings back some good times and some sad ones as well.

You know where you were on Dec. 8, 1980. Feel free to share your Lennon stories below.

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