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.