Beatles music to hit streaming services

The Beatles back catalogue is being made available on music streaming services from Christmas Eve.

Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal, Amazon Prime Music, Deezer, Microsoft Groove, Napster and Slacker Radio are making the Fab Four’s music available to stream.

Chris Cooke, co-founder of the music industry news site CMU, tells the BBC: “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 some best-of collections.

Neil Young, Steven Wilson, Roger Waters and Tom DeLonge have previously told of their dislike of streaming services and highlighted how poorly artists are paid for allowing their work to be streamed.

Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford said in March of this year that he hoped common sense and fairness would prevail in the battle over streaming services in the music industry.

Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022. 

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