The Beatles’ music is being made available on a wide range of streaming music services. Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime Music are among nine services that will offer the band’s tracks worldwide. Other services that have secured the band’s catalogue include Deezer, Microsoft Groove, Napster, and Slacker Radio.
The group split up in April 1970. However, their songs – including “Hey Jude” and “Yesterday” – remain hugely popular and influential. One expert suggested that the move would help their legacy endure.
December 24 at 12:01am local time, The Beatles’ music is available for streaming worldwide: https://t.co/99cigizLza pic.twitter.com/42vZSNGVHG
— The Beatles (@thebeatles) December 23, 2015
From Chris Cooke, co-founder of the music industry news site CMU:
In terms of digital the Beatles have always been quite late to the party – they came to iTunes in 2010, which was a good five years after the iTunes Music Store started gaining momentum.
We had expected they would probably do an exclusive deal to stream their music with one service, but it looks like instead they are going to be pretty much everywhere from day one.
So, I suppose that is them accepting that streaming is now a very serious, significant part of the record industry.
The deal involves rights to stream 224 songs from the original 13 studio albums released in the UK as well as “essential” collections including Past Masters.
The tracks will be made available from 24 December.
Why did it take so long?
According to Mark Mulligan from the media research firm Midia:
There’s a really simply reason why the Beatles catalogue took so long to join streaming services – their publishers didn’t want to do anything to damage potential sales of reissues and retrospectives – it’s a very lucrative catalogue.
But they’ve waited until the market has got some scale and they could get the best deal. It’s a big PR catch as it helps communicate that the platforms are ‘all the music in the world’ – which is the value proposition of streaming services.
Their arrival on streaming services comes as consumption on those platforms starts to overtake digital downloads as a source of income for the music industry. The number of songs streamed in the UK looks set to top 25 billion this year, up from 13.7 billion in 2014, according to the Official Charts Company.
It will be interesting to see how the band’s music competes against the likes of Justin Bieber – whose latest singles are being streamed almost six million times a week, exerting a firm grip on the top of the charts.
When The Beatles became available to buy on iTunes, the band scored 10 entries into the Top 100 – but the top-selling song (“Hey Jude”) only reached number 40.
What do you think? Are you looking forward to streaming The Beatles on your favorite streaming service? Let us know in the comment section below or on Google+, Facebook, or Twitter.
[button link=”http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/23/beatles-back-catalogue-music-streaming-spotify-apple-music” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: The Guardian[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
