Unauthorized Beatles Masterpieces

This week­end’s New York Times ran a piece detail­ing how the record indus­try has dithered and con­tin­u­al­ly failed to release sev­er­al long-await­ed Bea­t­les’ projects. It also men­tioned how fans and col­lec­tors have forged ahead and put togeth­er unau­tho­rized boot­leg projects, some of which the Times calls “cura­to­r­i­al mas­ter­pieces.” In par­tic­u­lar, the arti­cle high­lights the Pur­ple Chick label, which “has assem­bled deluxe edi­tions of each com­mer­cial­ly released [Bea­t­les] album, offer­ing the orig­i­nal discs in their mono and stereo mix­es, along with the sin­gles (also in mono and stereo) released at the time, as well as every known demo, stu­dio out­take and alter­na­tive mix.” Some of Pur­ple Chick­’s include “Bea­t­les Deluxe” (which cov­ers 10 CDs);  “A/B Road” (which gives you 96 hours of the “Let It Be” ses­sions); and a series of BBC radio per­for­mances. 

So how do you get this stuff? It’s a ques­tion that Rolling Stone asked rhetor­i­cal­ly when it recent­ly gave anoth­er pos­i­tive review to Pur­ple Chick record­ings. And it answered the ques­tion with this: “Google is your friend: Try search­ing ‘pur­ple chick and megau­pload’ to get start­ed.”

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