The Beatles’ book, which came out this summer, represents Rolling Stone’s first foray into apps, though replica versions of the magazine are available on Nook, Fire and Zinio. The Beatles app costs $9.99 — the same as the print version — and is not currently available on Android.

The app contains the same content as the print book and has 122 pages with over 60 photos. However, it was redesigned for the iPad and as such, is not considered a “digital replica.” In addition the app contains 30 second sound samples (via iTunes) for every song and the ability to purchase each song through iTunes.

It also features interviews from Jim James of My Morning Jacket, James Taylor, Stevie Nicks, Liz Phair, Steven Van Zandt, Liam Gallagher, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, Graham Nash, Bob Weir and others, as well as a guide to the best non-album tracks.

The release of the app on December 1 in the iTunes Store comes after several months of changes on Rolling Stone’s digital side. It also represents a significant embrace of the app economy several months after Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone and publisher of US Weekly and Men’s Journal told AdAge’s Nat Ives that publishers were “prematurely rushing [to create tablet versions of their titles] and showing little confidence and faith in what they’ve really got, their real asset, which is the magazine itself.”

Still, he was sure to say that he wasn’t trashing tablets, just he didn’t see digital replicas replacing the physical magazine any time soon.

The company’s renewed digital push really began in earnest in the spring of 2010, when Rolling Stone finally took control of its website back from RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK) last summer — now it’s finally putting the contents of the entire magazine, along with over 40 years worth of archives, online.

The decision to issue the Beatles book as an app package comes amid a flurry of deals by magazine and newspaper publishers to repurpose print content in e-book form. Earlier today, for example, Hachette Book Group said it was teaming up with Bloomberg BusinessWeek on e-singles drawn from articles that have appeared in the magazine.

The app release also reflects Wenner’s deliberative — some would say tentative and cautious — approach to digital content. Ultimately, since the revenue is still mostly derived from print, digital will provide the incremental boost in terms of attracting paying readers and advertisers. After all, as Wenner has said, what’s rush? Still, given its need to reach younger music fans in addition the baby boomers who grew up with Rolling Stone, the magazine’s digital presence is increasingly crucial to retaining its relevance.

As evidence of its new digital momentum, for October, USmagazine.com’s comScore numbers showed 10,374,000 unique visitors, or about 2 million less than Time Inc. rival People.com. It’s the second highest traffic number in USmagazine.com’s history, up 17 percent versus September, the company said. Also, total pageviews are up 9.1 percent to 214 million.

Twelve months before Apple secured an exclusive on selling The Fab Four digitally, EMI filed a copyright abuse claim against BlueBeat in November 2009, for selling Beatles tracks without authorisation at just 25 cents each.

But the site’s owner Hank Risan, in a particularly ballsy defense, had argued BlueBeat itself owned copyright on the tracks it was selling, because he had used a “psycho-acoustic simulation device” to deconstruct, perform and rerecord “entirely new and original sounds” – simulations, that just happened to sound like the originals.

Reuters: “According to BlueBeat, the scheme was protected by a section in the copyright law that doesn’t extend rights of copyright owners to ‘the making or duplication of another sound recording that consists entirely of an independent fixation of other sounds, even though such sounds imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted sound recording’.”

But Judge Josephine Staton Tucker, in her judgement, states: “Risan’s obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language appears to be a long-winded way of describing “sampling,” i.e. copying, and fails to provide any concrete evidence of independent creation.”

“BlueBeat fails to provide any evidence … showing how or why its purported ‘simulations’ are anything but illicit copies of the Copyrighted Recordings… BlueBeat is liable for copyright infringement, misappropriation, unfair competition, and conversion.”

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) sold more than 450,000 albums and two million singles during the first seven days in which it had The Beatles on iTunes Store.

That means other music download retailers like Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) MP3, eMusic and Napster will negotiate, or already have been, to carry Beatles tracks at some point in the New Year.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and EMI are no strangers to exclusives together. When EMI gave its higher-bitrate repertoire exclusively to Apple back in 2007, it was only a month before other digital music retailers got the files, too. So if there is any significant money left to be made from Beatles music digitally, it could radiate out to more than just Apple.

Rhapsody tells us: “While the details behind the agreements Apple has made with EMI are too scant for us to comment on any specific plans to carry the Beatles catalogue, the Beatles are obviously one of the world’s most influential bands, so we would certainly be interested in offering Beatles music to our subscribers once it becomes available.”

We7 tells us it has not yet entered discussions with rightsholders.

iTunes Store’s peers were aware of the Apple exclusive ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, our sources suggest.

Though exclusivity ends, however, that doesn’t necessarily mean streaming services could join download services in a free-for-all. It’s possible rightsholders have limited even post-exclusive availability to individual track downloads so they can profit more greatly from larger royalty tiers.

In so far as the streaming segment is separate from the download segment, The Beatles is a signature Spotify may fancy for offering to its premium subscribers. The service tells us: “It’s great to see The Fab Four move into the digital sphere and is a big step towards having their music made available on a wider variety of digital platforms, including Spotify, in the future.”

Confirmation that iTunes Store will have a digital exclusive on The Beatles’ back-catalogue leaves nonplussed those of us who have covered the once-exciting prospect for going on four or more years.

Befitting a company whose iPhone alarm DST bug held up thousands of users this month, this announcement is late to its own party – that party being last year’s 09-09-09 digital multimedia remastering exercise, which brought loads more Beatles CD re-releases to the market and the back-catalogue out through new formats like Beatles Rock Band and a USB stick.

Now the terms are finally signed (and we still don’t know them), Apple is getting its turn. iTunes Store is now selling tracks from The Beatles’ 13 studio albums at $1.29 each, the albums for $12.99 and double albums for $19.99; the albums come as iTunes LPs with additional documentaries and virtual “booklets”. No doubt, the cash cow Apple really wants to milk is the 256-track “box set” at $149 – a discount on the individual prices.

But, while the re-releases will likely contribute worthwhile sales to iTunes Store, and incremental licensing income to troubled EMI, the net boost mat not be as great as it could have been had it come when pent-up demand was even more evident, two years earlier, and before that demand was satisfied by 2009′s remasters. Indeed, Tower Records is currently selling remastered Abbey Road CDs for $3 less than Apple (audiophiles will note that CD quality exceeds that of iTunes’ 256Kbps files).

Apple’s exclusive also does little to arrest the industry’s underlying problem that, in a recorded music market which is generally declining in much of the world, U.S. digital downloads, of which iTunes Store is the largest retailer, have themselves now plateaued.

The Beatles deal is likely totemic to Steve Jobs (Apple has devoted its ENTIRE homepage to the Fab Four), and perhaps to anyone who remembers the 60s. But it’s a long way short of iTunes’ long-expected introduction of an unlimited-access or streaming subscription – a model many labels, concerned to combat downloads’ slowdown with new models for the future, are desperate for.

New NPD research suggests nearly as many Americans now stream music as download it, and take-up of the former is growing quicker; more French stream than download. But Apple’s Beatles extravaganza is one big splurge to keep the a la carte model ticking over.

Note, in Apple’s project, the redeployment of analogue terms like “booklets” and “box sets” – this exercise is exactly in line with what iTunes Store has always been; a digital version of the old recorded music paradigm, not a systemic reinvention of it. Even Apple’s online promo slogans like “The Band That Changed Everything” knowingly mirror an iTunes that itself once changed everything in music sales – but which many are now looking to for a 2.0 moment.

What’s been the hold-up anyway? McCartney told The Observer last year there was a sticking point over how much Apple Corps would get paid in the event of piracy: “We’ve been keen to do this for a while … If [digitised Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, ‘Now you recompense us for that.’ And (EMI) they’re scared of that.”

The next cog in the Beatles money machine? I will brace myself for the hi-def, uncompressed FLAC reissues at a later date – so much like the originals, you’d swear Yoko were in the studio with you.

Given the attention its announcement in the ITunes feature box earlier this afternoon garnered, it sounds like there’s no turning back this time. The introduction of The Beatles’ music into the iTunes store has taken years of negotiations and many false starts. Things appeared to come together last week during talks between Apple and representatives of the Beatles and their record label, EMI Group.

Over the years, the dashed hopes have been too numerous to count. But there has been steady progress since February 2007, when Apple and The Beatles settled their long-standing trademark lawsuit of the “Apple” name in connection with the music business. Since then, expectation has run high, through The Beatles’ agreement with Viacom (NYSE: VIA) to star in their own Rock Band video game to last summer, when Apple Records began placing some of its artists’ recordings on iTunes.

Robert adds: Beatles on iTunes? At this point: a shoulder shrug and a “meh.” They missed last year’s big re-release bandwagon, and the one before that. This digital project is now set quite far behind the “analogue” equivalent. That means the digital opportunity may be far less than it would have been had they got this done two years ago. The remastering project was cross-platform (one output was Beatles Rock Band). There’s a likelihood they’ve squandered the bulk of the opportunity, even if it’s lucrative. A working alarm clock would probably have more impact on most folks’ lives.

More to come

The initial word on the street was that the announcement has to do with adding cloud functionality to the iTunes store, which could pave the way to streaming music and other content. Indeed, there are a lot of arrows pointing in this direction: a new data center that Apple is polishing in North Carolina; a cloud service already available with Apple TV; the Lala streaming service that Apple bought and then shut down without explanation, and of course the growing number of streaming-based content services that are out there already and catching the eyes of consumers.

A cloud music service from Apple could be major. The company already controls 28 percent of the overall U.S. music market and 70 percent of the download market, according to NPD. Getting involved in a cloud-based offering, and potentially streaming, would be a major endorsement of these areas – but also a killer for the rest of those trying to carve out marketshare, from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) to Spotify and Zune.

There’s lots more that could come out of something like a cloud-based iTunes service, such as partnerships between Apple and mobile operators, and perhaps broadband providers, to bundle the service with Internet access.

What did you think the announcement would cover?

Members of the Beatles were directly connected to several of the albums or the artists. Paul McCartney and George Harrison can be heard on Taylor’s Carolina In My Mind; McCartney worked with The Iveys before they became Badfinger. Two of the albums are by Billy Preston (in my mind the real “fifth” Beatle); Harrison produced That’s The Way God Planned It and Encouraging Words with My Sweet Lord and All Things Must Pass before his own releases. Others are Doris Troy, whose self-titled album features Peter Frampton. Eric Clapton, Preston and songs with with Harrison and Ringo Starr; Modern Jazz Quartet; John Tavener; two from Mary Hopkin (Those Were The Days); four from Badfinger.

By now many who own the albums have already ripped them to their own digital collections, as undoubtedly, have some who never owned them. All my Beatles CDs are already on my hard drive and player. What makes these different is how difficult it can be to find some of them.

Cheers for making it happen. Deep sighs for taking so freaking long.

For those who have been blessedly out of the loop, Wednesday is the day the Beatles’ remastered catalog goes on sale along with Beatles Rock Band edition; Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) also has a press cluster scheduled. That would make it a natural day for a grand announcement that the former litigants have come together, right? Not so fast. Ernesto Schmitt, EMI

Two of the songs aired during the show; five, including Back in the USSR and Helter Skelter, are online only at the Late Show site and CBS Interactive’s TV.com. The video can’t be embedded so all the traffic is being funneled to the sites (a plus for CBS but not so much for fans); the pre-roll ad I saw was for Tanqueray gin. [Update: Embedding is now enabled so we've added the video below. Nicely done.]

The video has a very you-are-there feel; not awesome sound but it works. The entire 22-minute set went online as the show ended on the east coast; Letterman episodes usually have more lag time. One small thing — I may have missed it but I don’t recall Letterman telling people to go to the website for more Sir Paul. Also, I’m not sure yet if the video can be seen (legally) outside the U.S. (The answer is yes.)

The 45 tracks bundled in The Beatles: Rock Band include I Saw Her Standing There, Day Tripper and I Want To Hold Your Hand; players will be able to download other songs on Xbox Live, of course, including the entire Abbey Road album. There’s even a charity angle: all sales of the track All You Need Is Love will be donated to Doctors Without Borders. Catch the trailer, complete with trippy I Am The Walrus visuals below …