If you’ve been using streaming services as your main means of consuming music, you’ve surely noticed, and mourned, a Beatles-shaped hole. That or, even worse (though it’s blasphemy to say or think it), as a necessary means of self-preservation, you may have started to kind of…forget the Beatles were even there to begin with.
Mourning and self-preservational forgetting need no longer factor in to your streaming experience, though. Perhaps understanding that signing on to services of varying ethical reputations unfortunately is important to artists’ legacies, the Beatles’ music will, starting tomorrow, be available across nine platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime Music. According to CMU co-founder Chris Cooke, quoted in BBC, it was initially anticipated that the Beatles would stream their music through one service, so this news of Beatles tunes sweeping the streaming terrain is a pleasant surprise. (Interestingly, Rolling Stone notes that the surprise might not be quite as pleasant for Beatles cover bands who, to this point, have greatly benefitted from providing substitutes for Beatles originals on streaming services.)
The deal comprises 224 songs across the band’s 13 studio albums, as well as some collections (two Greatest Hits compilations and The Past Masters, Yellow Submarine). So, if you stay up until 12:01 am tomorrow morning, you can see what it’s like to suddenly click into Spotify and play your favorite Beatles track — though, spoiler, it probably won’t be too dissimilar to listening to it on Youtube, CD or whatever other roundabout way you’ve been doing it for all these years without streaming.