Yesterday Apple announced the debut of the John Lennon solo catalog on the iTunes Store. Sixteen of Lennon’s solo works from EMI Music are available for the first time on iTunes starting today, with the “Lennon Legend” and “Acoustic” collections making their worldwide digital debuts. For a limited period of 30 days, exclusive video content will be included with the albums “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band,” “Sometime in New York City,” “Walls and Bridges,” “Milk and Honey” and the collections “Anthology” and “Working Class Hero.”

“John would have loved the fact that his music will now be available in a format suited to a new generation of listeners,” said Yoko Ono.

“John Lennon is one of the greatest artists of our time,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re thrilled to have his solo catalog available on the iTunes Store for the first time.”

As part of EMI Music’s digital catalog, the John Lennon solo works will be available in iTunes Plus, offering DRM-free music tracks with high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings—for just $1.29 per song.

One Step Closer to The Beatles?

9to5Mac.com notes that Lennon is the second Beatles artist in the last few months to join iTunes with a solo catalog.

The site also reminds us of the iPod UI videos we saw back in July, they contained multiple references to The Beatles, the videos were later pulled from the majority of sites by Apple Legal.

Also while Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone at Macworld in January 2007, he scrolled past several Beatles album covers.