The Beatles: Now Streaming [VIDEO]

Long-awaited news for mop-top fans via Rolling Stone:

The Beatles have announced they’ll activate their famous catalog on every on-demand streaming service, from Spotify to Apple Music, as of midnight on December 24th and the record business has one overwhelming reaction: What took them so long? “It’s surprising they didn’t do it this time last year,” says Terry McBride, manager of Father John Misty, fun. and many others. “They probably have lost 10s of millions of dollars by not doing it. I’m quite sure there are many people, maybe in the millions, who are Beatles fans that have not been listening to the Beatles. That’s a huge lost opportunity on so many levels.”

Over the past few years, the record business has shifted its model from selling CDs and downloads to streaming — revenue from Spotify, YouTube and the others jumped from less than $600 million in 2012 to nearly $1.1 billion in 2014, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Numerous artists, including Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Joanna Newsom, have complained about the low royalty payments they receive from streaming, and Taylor Swift and Adele have withheld their blockbuster albums from the services during the past two years. But the Beatles’ presence gives the business what Jack Isquith, a Slacker Radio senior vice president and former Warner Bros. Records digital-music executive, calls a “giant validation of streaming