Billboard’s Guess: The Beatles

Anton Bruno:

For these (admittedly thin) reasons and others that we can’t yet divulge here, place your bets on a Beatles announcement tomorrow.

I’ll go with The Beatles catalog as my guess, too. It’s really the only explanation I can think of that would be a big enough deal to warrant this promotional hype but which would not warrant a media event. I think the clocks are just clocks, but the headline is, to my ears, a bit stilted, and makes a lot more sense if it’s a reference to the McCartney song. (Might also be one last fuck you to Yoko Ono from Jobs — by making the headline a reference to a song Paul released as a solo artist.)

Other popular guesses:

  • Music streaming service, based on Lala acquisition. Possible, but I doubt it. I think they’d have an event for that, and as Peter Kafka writes, there have been no leaks from the music industry about such a deal. Apple can keep its mouth shut, but the music labels can’t.

  • Cloud-based backup/streaming of purchased content. Possible, but I think this is the sort of thing they’d demo and explain at a media event.

  • A digital “newsstand”, for subscription-based delivery of newspapers and magazines to iOS devices. No way — again, that’s the sort of thing they’d demo and explain at a media event.

In short, major new Apple products are unveiled at events. A major new content deal is the sort of thing Apple might announce without an event.

★ Monday, 15 November 2010