I’ve written before about the mysteries of why the Beatles haven’t allowed their catalog to be sold digitally. With the songs being ripped by the billions in any case, why isn’t the band getting a piece of the action?

Here’s a hint, from a Billboard interview with George Martin:

Billboard; Speaking of iPods, do you know when the Beatles will make their catalog available online?

Martin: It’s still under discussion, and nothing has been determined yet. I think it’s inevitable that sooner or later the Beatles will be available, but it’s got to be on their terms, really. I think that’s the essence of it. There’s so much piracy, there’s so much illegal downloading. In that way, we’re devaluing our history. Young people now say to themselves, “This stuff is free and it should be free. Why should we have to pay for music? Music is free, isn’t it?” And that in itself is a belief that shouldn’t be there and is encouraged by Internet downloading.

Emphasis added. Isn’t Martin betraying a fundamental misapprehension of the issue? Of course there’s illegal downloading. What is the band doing—petulantly sitting the transition out in retaliation?

The key, I think, is that line about “on the band’s terms.” He and by extension the band is still living back in the CD age, where holding the catalog back built up demand. That’s not true any more.

Martin’s lack of understanding doesn’t make this likely, but here’s an alternative argument: It’s possible some high-level calculations are going on behind the scenes. The group’s last repackaging, the 1 album, sold more than eleven million copies in the U.S. alone. Accountants for the band and EMI could have crunched the numbers about digital sales versus another bonanza like that and concluded that iTunes would cannibalize the income for the next such outing in a way that made it the lesser option.

It could be that the band at this point makes more money from hard-copy sales than it would from digital ones. (Or it could be the label figured out that CD sales are more profitable for it.) As I’ve noted before, the band sells about a million and a half CDs in a normal year.

(All of this speculation, incidentally, takes it for granted that both EMI and the Beatles or their respective estates have an equal say in the decision-making. Even if by the letter of whatever contracts are at issue in making the recordings available digitally EMI can basically do what it wants, which is probably true, one assumes that to avoid a public battle the band members have effective veto power.)

Anyway, even if all of that were true about the calculations it’s likely the people involved are not taking into account the myriad new business opportunities in the digital sphere. They could sell special editions, complete digital catalogs with some physical crap souvenirs, various assemblages (John songs! Ringo songs!), new graphic covers that come up on your iPod screen … and all sorts of other things.

And then they can remaster the songs and up the bit rate to a lossless format and sell the darn things all over again. Slogan: “The greatest music ever made, finally available digitally the way they were meant to be heard.”

Speaking of which, Martin’s a pro, so it’s unlikely he would give secrets away, but it sure didn’t sound like he was involved in a remastering effort of the band’s catalog.