(Credits: Far Out / Apple Corps)
Wed 3 September 2025 0:00, UK
The Beatles would undoubtedly have smug about the name Apple Corps when they chose to form their own record label because it’s the kind of whimsical joke that’s right up their alley.
Now, imagine the nightmarish scenario of someone coming along and stealing their thunder by forming a much larger corporation with a similar name and subsequently infringing on their trademark. Talk about taking a dump in the Christmas soup. That’s what happened when future tech goliaths Apple registered their name in 1978, and The Beatles were pissed off.
Now, The Beatles hadn’t existed for eight years at this point, and as a group, they were only around for three years of their existence anyway, but that doesn’t mean that they were defunct and not trying to put anything out, and having another company stealing their name and potential revenue from them didn’t sit well with them. From the early days, they’d released tracks from the likes of Mary Hopkin and Badfinger, and had also formed an avant-garde imprint, Zapple, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono could release their more bizarre projects.
Of course, Apple are a tech company, not a record label, but the fact that they had several ventures that could be considered as commercial overlap with The Beatles’ label meant that the band were well within their rights to kick up a fuss and ask for a settlement. But, just how much did they demand, and how many times did Apple find themselves having to pay up?
How much did Apple Computers have to pay The Beatles?
The Beatles first took Apple to court shortly after their formation in 1978, and in a dispute that lasted three years, a settlement for $80,000 was made on the agreement that Apple Computers would not enter the music industry, and Apple Corps would not make computers. This seems like a simple enough agreement to follow, and considering they were operating within two different markets, it seemed like a reasonable amount to shake hands upon.
This didn’t take long for Apple Computers to breach, however, and they were challenged once again by the label in 1986 over this broken agreement, when they introduced the capability of playing MIDI files on their computers. This isn’t exactly the same as ‘entering the music industry’, but it could reasonably cause confusion from a consumer’s perspective, as far as the law is concerned, and this incensed the suits running the label.
If there was ever a hint that things would get nasty, it was when Apple employee Jim Reekes stoked the fire by putting a startup sound on the Mac System 7 called ‘Sosumi’, which is meant to be phonetically pronounced the same as ‘so sue me’. Apple were tugging at their collars when Reekes decided to do this, thinking that it wouldn’t help their case in court, but the operating system was eventually released in 1991, which happened to be the year the lawsuit was finally settled for $26.5million, equivalent to over $60m in today’s money.
There have been several other instances where Apple must have broken their agreement with the label, such as entering the music downloading, portable player and streaming worlds, but all disputes appear to have been settled for now. Perhaps it was inevitable after they had broken their agreement once and had the life sued out of them that pursuing another payment wouldn’t be necessary, but Apple are now considerably bigger than the record label, who, while not defunct, now only release reissues and Beatles archival material.
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