Another solo Beatle catalog goes up for sale on iTunes

A number of Beatle John Lennon's solo albums went up for sale on Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes Store today, including exclusive video content on a number of the singer's post-Beatles albums reports NME.com. The Lennon catalog joins Paul McCartney's as the only two EMI-based Beatles-related catalogs for sale on the giant music store. Fellow Beatle Ringo Starr's solo EMI catalog will join those two, in addition to his own post-EMI catalog, later this month.

The inclusion of Lennon's solo catalog comes barely two months after the Instant Karma: Save Darfur album featuring covers of Lennon solo tracks debuted at number nine in the Billboard charts. Lennon's catalog includes all of the recent Yoko Ono supervised remastering work that has been made on several albums since 2000, including the singer's landmark Imagine album. The tracks are available as part of the iTunes Plus service, where all EMI-based tracks are free of Digital Rights Management technology.

Billboard.biz is heralding the addition of this catalog as the resumption of speculation about when The Beatles catalog will be made available online, something that has been rumored in the works as a serious notion since at least January of this year. As far as speculation goes, the addition of one more solo Beatle catalog clearly makes the argument for a soon to be released Beatle catalog online stronger. As reported so often, a date is not available, but it still seems safe to presume that 2008 is the earliest any release could occur.