Norwegian first: Download all Beatles music legally!

It's no big thing in the scheme of things, but NRK (The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) has just started uploading the 212 episodes podcasts of the series Vår daglige Beatles (Our daily Beatles) which aired in 2007.

Running between 5 and 8 minutes in length a presenter tells the story of a Beatles song with the song itself ending the poodcast. The quality of the podcast is a modest 128 kbps, but this is the first time that all Beatles songs will be available as a free, legal download.

Here's the address to the podcast feed if you'd like to practise your Norweigan:

http://podkast.nrk.no/program/beatles_komplett.rss

Note that the 212 podcasts will only be available for four weeks.

Here's NRK:s own text about the whole thing:

Some weeks ago, NRK - Norwegian Braodcasting - signed a deal with music rights holder organisation TONO in Norway. The new deal gives NRK right to publish podcasts of all previously broadcasted radio- and tv-programs that contains less then 70% music.

Podcast containing music may be up for four weeks, while our podcast without music stay up on our server forever.

One result of this deal, is that we now can publish “Vår daglige Beatles” - “Our Daily Beatles” in English - as a podcast.

In this series from 2001, journalists Finn Tokvam og Bård Ose tells the story of every single Beatles tracks ever made, chronologically. Each episode contains a 3 minute story about each track (sadly for our international visitors - in Norwegian) and the actual Beatles tune.

This is - as far as we know - the first time you can download the Beatles’ music legally. Neither iTunes nor Amazon have The Beatles in their music stores.

The first episodes are already in the podcast, available from this RSS-feed:

http://podkast.nrk.no/program/beatles_komplett.rss

All NRK podcasts are available at nrk.no/podcast

For more information about NRK - se our English about page. NRKbeta.no is NRKs Norwegian technology website with some occasional English articles.

Update January 7:
And the uploaded podcasts are down and none of the remaining will be posted. Why? Did The Beatles stop this? Nope, it was the way the agreement was written. NRK can only podcast shows that have been aired in the past four weeks, and as these Beatles shorts were broadcast back in 2007 they are way over the four week limit.

More on why the Beatles series podcast was pulled can be read here:

NRKBetas's blog entry.

New York Times article.

One way to get the podcasts online would be if NRK decided to rerun the series on the radio. But that will not happen according to NRK.