EMI has sent 5m remastered CD recordings by The Beatles to retailers as it looks to the band that helped define the rock and roll album to stem the format’s decline in the age of the single track download.

Advance orders indicated that Wednesday’s re-release of all 14 UK Beatles albums, covering UK’s output, was on track to be “the biggest catalogue reissue ever conducted in the history of the music business”, Ernesto Schmitt, head of EMI’s global catalogue business, told the Financial Times.