After years of avoiding the streaming marketplace, the Fab Four’s music will be available on a host of streaming services starting Christmas Eve. The Beatles catalogue consists of 13 studio albums, each of which as been remastered, and four compilation albums. Billboard writes, “The group’s long holdout from streaming mirror their belated arrival to the world of downloads, via an exclusive contract with Apple’s iTunes in 2010”.
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“On December 24 at 12:01am in your time zone around the world”, Spotify said, “The Beatles’ catalogue will be available on Spotify for all of our users (both free and Premium)”. Browsing through Amazon one can see that the music has been reissued in its original US LP forms, which means getting two songs per CD, of course.
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But the pushback has been hard from patients, doctors and the drug industry, as well as groups such as the U.S. Other risk factors are given by its high availability, its low price and its high purity.
It’s an interesting move for Apple Corps, the company that oversees the rights of The Beatles (ergo former members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and the families of deceased former members, George Harrison and John Lennon).
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Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal are among nine services that will offer the tracks worldwide. A statement accompanying the news simply said, “Happy Crimble, with love from us to you”. The vast difference among those numbers may be what persuaded Universal Music to release the catalog to streaming.
The Beatles’ release on streaming services is another sign that on-demand music streaming is dominating the industry, despite continuing pockets of resistance.
For smaller, independent musical groups, streaming has come under fire for giving musicians incredibly small royalty payments per stream.
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So here’s hoping The Beatles make a big enough splash to kick Justin Bieber off the top of Spotify’s global chart. Pandora on Wednesday got final approval to buy the bankrupt Web music streaming service for $75 million.
