After years of legal wrangling and Beatles fans left without iTunes access to their favorite Beatles songs, iTunes recently began offering digital editions of Beatles songs. Waiting years for easy digital access to these songs made Beatles fans eager to get their hands on the downloads, and download them they did.

Traffic was expected to be heavy to the site when the Beatles catalog was released on iTunes, and fans met that expectation by buying more than 2 million Beatles songs during their first week of availability. The full album may be a dying art form this decade thanks to mp3s, but among Beatles fans it's still very much in demand, at least, when it comes to the boys. During that first week there were 450,000 downloads of full Beatles albums. This came just six months after both Sir Paul and Yoko Ono said that a deal wasn't to be expected because of record label wrangling.

Oddly enough, CNN/Money found that that more than a quarter of that traffic didn't come from fans who went directly to the iTunes site or who used search engines to get there. Instead, more than 26 percent of that initial traffic came from social networking sites like Facebook. Fans were out there spreading the word, one to the next, and one out of every 200 Facebook users during the introduction period left the site and went directly to the Apple site.


Other than vinyl, CDs and iTunes downloads, Beatles fans can get the music and Beatles info they crave with the Beatles USB. Introduced last year, it is a small, apple-shaped USB device that stores every song from 14 albums (including Past Masters), rare photos and 13 mini-documentaries that add to your Beatles immersion experience.