Meet the Beatles, Again
The four lads from Liverpool are back, in what may be the musical event of the year.
As CBS News business correspondent Anthony Mason reports, Wednesday marks the release of 14 newly remastered Beatles albums and a new Beatles version of the video game "Rock Band" - endorsed by the two surviving members, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
"Who would have ever thought we end up as androids," McCartney said at the Rock Band press conference this past June.
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Four million copies of the game, in which players score points by hitting the Beatles' notes, will be shipped worldwide. It introduces a whole new audience to the music made more that 40 years ago at Abbey Road Studios in London.
"It was just the four of them making noise together in one of these rooms, and what came out is sensational," said Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin.
A team of seven Abbey Road engineers spent a full year remastering all 14 Beatles albums.
"These now sound pretty much as close to the master tapes as you're gonna get them," said engineer Allan Rouse.
So millions of Beatles fans are expected to buy albums they already own.
Billboard editor Rob Levine says there's a reason that the Beatles are the best-selling artists of all time, with 170 million albums sold.
"They are one of the few acts on which we all agree," said Levine. "We all like the Beatles. We may not all love the Beatles, but we all like the Beatles."
A recent survey found that the Fab Four were the only act to rank in the top four in all age groups. Beatlemania endures from the London Beatles store, to Web sites like thefest.com, where owner Mark Lapidus sells only Beatles merchandise. Lapidus says they have over 1,500 items, and quickly sold most of his allotment of the new CD's that aren't even out yet.
Already the second-best selling act of this decade, the Beatles could now surpass Eminem to become No. 1.
Four decades after the band split, we still don't want to say good-bye to the Beatles.
