Come And Get It: The Best of Apple Records | Fab forum

 I guess the idea was to show that Apple werent just The Beatles but had other strong artists once upon a time, not that [m]any of the artists lasted for a period of time on Apple.

As for the omission I dont particularly care, and would have been more surprised if they were represented. As for where the decision came from it was probably right from the beginning of the project and The Beatles and their representitives were happy to go along with it ie couldnt care less. It may have sold a few more copies if the beatles were on it but i doubt it would have been a massive amount.

My guess is that EMI holds the masters, so they might have been unable to get them on, or b) they wanted to do the "Best of Apple" without removing perfectly good songs for rehashes they just rereleased.

Well, I guess with ANY label sampler, you're taking the chance of some duplication – though when the label roster is largely "THE BEATLES!! and whoever else" that's more inevitable than usual, true.

My thinking is that "Hey Jude" was considered worthy of sharing a box with "Thingumybob" and "Sour Milk Sea" and "Those Were The Days" in 1968, so that – assuming there's no reason to suspect any latter-day song-snobbery taking place – including it as the lead-off track, followed by the latter three (all of which are present) would be a nice historical full-circle gesture. And of course it would help display the full breadth of the label more accurately. (As would a track or two by the Modern Jazz Quartet, but that's neither here, there or everywhere. Plus which, the MJQ didn't release any singles, as far as I can tell) But mostly I just admit that I think it'd be cool to see a compilation featuring The Beatles on it, that's my greedy reasoning.