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The Beatles “Anthologies” released to music services today

beatles anthologies 638w

When the Beatles discography was released to on-demand music services on midnight of Christmas Eve, it was a gift to music lovers of all persuasions, and a celebration of release, as an important body of 20th-century music was finally available to access in music subscriptions.

At midnight last night, the Beatles streaming collection was substantially enlarged and rounded with the release of the three Anthology double albums. The Beatles is a multimedia documentary (music, film, book) developed in the mid-1990s. The music portion includes a treasure chest of previously unreleased studio takes, alternate recordings, and live performances.

Much of this material, both audio and video, has been available on YouTube for many years. As always with highly publicized and long-awaited music-service releases, the news impact is somewhat undermined by YouTube’s seemingly bottomless user-uploaded catalog. But the business economics and money flow are different in the curated music services, as well as the usability for subscribers who are attached to one platform (e.g. Spotify, Rhapsody, Google Play Music, Apple Music).

The Anthology albums were created in 1995-1996, under the supervision of Paul, George, and Ringo.

Brad Hill

One Comment

  1. The research we did at Kurt’s Strategic Media Research for the original release of this compilation showed a substantial marketing potential to teens. At first we thought there was something out of alignment in the data, but a slew of re-contacts confirmed that this was the case. The Beatles’ appeal to new waves of teens continues 20 years later. I’d be really interested to see what the streaming analytics say about demographics, to-date and through this re-release.

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