Midnight struck, Santa came, we left cookies, he left The Beatles

The Beatles are finally on-demand.

It’s not the first time a celebrated hold-out splashily entered the interactive streaming space. In December, 2013 Led Zeppelin broke its vow of non-interactivity with an exclusive on-demand release on Spotify. (Later, Zep expanded to other services.) At the time, we noted that the band could be extensively heard on YouTube — always the forgotten but opulent provider of on-demand music even when artists are withholding their stuff from Spotify and Rhapsody.

That’s true with The Beatles, too; we have been enjoying the entire studio catalog plus mountains of live performances, for years.

But this release is special — partly because of the artistic immensity of The Beatles, and partly because they waited so darn long. User-generated oldies playlists in Spotify and other services are fundamentally incomplete without them, more painfully so because sometimes the void is filled with tribute bands covering Beatles songs. (That’s arguably worse than leaving out the songs entirely.)

So, we looked forward to the midnight release time all day yesterday, and stayed up much later marveling, listening, and building lists.

Spotify hit the timeline on the button, though we had to update the web app to make The Beatles appear.

Spotify, ever the assertive purveyor of playlists, was also armed with four house-created lists of selected Beatles tracks.

Rhapsody seemed to miss the moment, coming up empty at 12:01, 12:15, and 12:30 when we stopped checking the browser and Android apps. All good this morning, though.

Apple Music is on board, with the most subdued presentation of the three — a simple image announcement in the normal carousel of featured music. Yawn — just another day in the life for Apple.

In an interesting post, Mark Mulligan says that The Beatles are late to the party, however — “Fashionably late though. No so soon as to be left standing awkwardly waiting for something to happen and not too late to miss the real action.” Mulligan thinks The Beatles are important enough to set their own timetable. “For streaming services the Beatles catalogue is strategically important in the way it was for iTunes in that it helps communicate the value proposition of all the music in the world.”

He notes that a presence in streaming can introduce the band to young listeners and keep the music current. “As each new cohort of aging millennials passes 35 a smaller percentage of them will have ever regularly bought music. Thus from 2016 onwards every year will mean an ever smaller number of catalogue buyers coming into the top of the funnel.”

For those of us in older demos who have been interactively streaming for 15 years, last night’s big arrival of the world’s most influential band (arguably; go with us here) closes the loop on a tectonic disruption of music consumption. With The Beatles on board, the celestial jukebox feels finally complete. Tactical holdouts like Taylor Swift and Adele seem suddenly cast into the shadow, at least for today.