How The Beatles Performed On Their First Day On iTunes NZ

“It has been a long and winding road to get here,” Steve Jobs cheesily said of The Beatles back catalogue finally for sale on iTunes yesterday. The move had been a long time coming and the band were one of the last big bands to hold out on digital services but unlike their influence on iTunes in the US, their position on the NZ chart wasn’t quite as significant.

In fact, it was still the Black Eyed Peas dominating the singles chart and Rihanna doing the same with the albums chart.  (It’s worth mentioning that the chart is prone to changing dramatically at any moment since it’s based on instant sales and not weekly or daily tallies.) By late yesterday, the highest charting Beatles single was Let It Be, which when from charting in the late 70′s to no. 42 later in the evening. The highest selling albums went to the Red and Blue albums while the highest selling studio album was Sgt. Peppers which maintained a position inside the top 20.

The iTunes NZ albums chart at the end of yesterday

But the most interesting position was The Beatles $269.99 boxset that sat comfortably at no. 17. Perhaps it was a sign of how little you need to sell to chart that high since buying the entire boxset digitally in one go seems unrealistic, especially when the highest album entries were compilations of the groups most popular songs. How the sales will affect the official charts next week is still up in the air. On 09/09/09 when the group released their remastered albums it resulted in 13 of their albums re-entering/entering the NZ top 40 chart the following week. The boxset made it to no. 22 at the time and the highest entry came from Abbey Road.

And as The Guardian points out, the most significant band that hasn’t gone digital yet is AC/DC. How long they hold out after yesterday is uncertain.