Meet the (Streaming) Beatles

Reports have been out for about a week now that Christmas Eve will mark the debut of a new band on several streaming music services. Well, maybe not exactly new, because the Beatles first rocketed to fame in 1963 and broke up as a band in 1969. But until now (tomorrow, actually) if you wanted to listen to a streaming Beatles tune you could only do that on Pandora Media Inc.’s (NYSE: P) streaming radio. Or watch one of a huge selection of videos available free (and legal) on YouTube.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) struck a deal for the band’s music and began selling it at the iTunes store in 2010, long after iTunes had launched. Apple’s streaming service, Apple Music, is one of nine streaming services that are expected to have the Beatles catalog available beginning on Christmas Eve. The others are Spotify, Slacker, Tidal, Microsoft Groove, Rhapsody, Deezer, Google Play and Amazon Prime.

According to Statistic Brain, the Beatles had sold 2.3 billion albums as of February 2014; 585,000 albums on iTunes; and 2.8 million iTunes singles. The vast difference among those numbers may be what persuaded Universal Music to release the catalog to streaming. The most often streamed song in 2015, according to Billboard Magazine, was Adele’s “Hello” with 61.6 million streams in the week of November 14 alone.
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Now it takes a lot more streams to make a buck than it does single or album sales, but look at the numbers again. Even if iTunes paid the Beatles $1 per single sold, that’s just $2.8 million dollars in about four years. For the Beatles to get paid that much in streaming revenue from, for example, Spotify, the band would have to attract about 540 million streams (estimated payment per stream is $0.00521). Adele’s “Hello” has been streamed almost 278 million times in just seven weeks.

Can the Beatles match that? Probably not, but their catalog is enormous and the baby boomers who grew up with them have probably worn out the records by now and wouldn’t mind having the band’s entire catalog available to stream. And they probably can even afford to pay for a subscription to a streaming service.