The Beatles are finally on iTunes

It’s official. As widely rumoured, Apple’s Tuesday-morning announcement was that the Beatles catalog would finally be available on iTunes.

The announcement had been promoted by Apple on Monday, promising: "Tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget".

The announcement ends an almost decade-long stalemate between the best-selling group and music’s largest retailer.

The band’s 13 studio albums, along with boxed sets and single tracks are available, Cupertino, California-based Apple said today in a statement. Single tracks sell for $1.29, while a set of the band’s entire collection is priced at $149.

"In 1964, the band that changed everything came to America," Apple said on its website. "Now they’re on iTunes."

The absence of the Beatles has been the highest-profile hole in the catalog of Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs’s digital store. The band has kept its focus on physical media, even as a decline in compact discs sends other artists to the Internet. Formed about 50 years ago, the Beatles have remained a top-seller, with customers buying more than 30 million albums in the last decade, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Apple and the Beatles had been embroiled in a long-running legal feud. In 2007, Apple and the Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd., the entity that handles the Fab Four’s business affairs, settled a trademark dispute about the apple name and logo.

"It has been a long and winding road to get here," Jobs said in the statement.

Single albums cost $12.99 and double albums are priced at $19.99, Apple said.

ITunes, introduced in 2001, is the largest destination for buying music in the U.S., bigger than Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., according to NPD Group Inc.

The Beatles had the top-selling stand-alone album between 2000 and 2009 with their collection of greatest hits called "1," which sold 11.5 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The Beatles are the top-selling band in history, with more than 1 billion albums sold worldwide, according to London-based EMI.

Beatles material has continued to find its way online as a popular target on illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, said Eric Garland, chief executive officer of BigChampagne, which tracks consumption of media online at authorized and unauthorized websites.

"For more than a decade, unauthorized copies of the entire Beatles catalog have been available and popular online, but your only legitimate option to buy the music was on CD," Garland said.

The rock band AC/DC is among artists who have kept their music from being sold through iTunes, where the range of prices is set by Apple.

Apple fell $1.60 to $305.44 at 10:15 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock had gained 46 percent this year before today.

The deal comes amid uncertainty at EMI. The company’s owner, private equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd., owes debt payments to Citigroup Inc., which helped bankroll the purchase of EMI in 2007.