Beatles’ music catalogue to become available on streaming services

Participating services include Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, Google Play and Amazon Prime.

The Beatles catalogue is now available on streaming services.

Fans of the Beatles around the world are getting a big Christmas present this year, as the iconic band’s full catalogue is released on major streaming services today.

London-based Apple Corps/UMG, which holds the rights to the music, posted the news on the Beatles’ website and released a video teaser on YouTube. The Beatles’ 13 remastered studio albums and four collections will be available at 12:01am Thursday in each country’s time zone, the band’s label said. New Zealand, then Australia led the way as the catalogue comes on line around the world.

Participating streaming services include Spotify AB, Apple’s Apple Music, Jay Z’s Tidal, Deezer, Alphabet’s Google Play and Amazon.com’s Amazon Prime.

The Beatles’ long-awaited streaming debut is a boon for the music industry. It could give a boost to the subscriber numbers of music streaming services, which record labels see as key to their future as CD sales and downloads decline. In particular, the Beatles’ songbook could help hook older, less tech-savvy consumers on music streaming, which hasn’t yet become a mainstream practice in the US.

Spotify, the largest service, counts more than 20 million paying subscribers and about 80 million free users worldwide; Apple Music had 6.5 million subscribers and 8.5 million in free trial as of October.

Though the Beatles catalogue will be available to both Spotify’s paying and free users, paying subscriber numbers could still see growth thanks to the sheer publicity the releases bring to Spotify’s brand.

The Beatles’ rights holders had long been interested in making the catalogue available on streaming services to maintain the relevancy of the Beatles brand, according to a person familiar with the matter. Though Spotify, Apple and Google would likely have paid handsomely for the exclusive streaming rights, the Beatles camp elected to release the material on all services and tiers to reach the broadest possible swath of fans.

While the move could dampen already declining CD and download sales in the long term, strengthening the brand could boost other revenue streams such as merchandise sales and Beatles-themed shows.

The Beatles have sold about 900,000 albums and two million digital songs this year, down from 1.2 million albums and 2.7 million songs last year, according to Nielsen Music.

Nielsen analyst Dave Bakula said that the Beatles’ streaming arrival could possibly even help sales by turning people onto the band for the first time.

“It’s hard to believe that anybody hasn’t discovered the Beatles yet, but there are still people out there,” Mr. Bakula said, adding that the band’s historic significance has bred fans that still want to own all of its music.

The Beatles’ music has long been available on internet radio services such as Pandora Media Inc. and on satellite radio, but never before via on-demand services.

The Beatles have been the most prominent streaming holdout, preferring instead to remaster existing albums and boost their quality.

In 2010, the band allowed its catalogue to appear on Apple Inc.’s iTunes store.

The group also was a latecomer to the CD era, waiting until 1987 to issue its main body of work on a medium that the industry had embraced in the early to middle part of the decade.