The Beatles’ streaming deal - a new era for the music industry? (Or are we all putting the McCartney before the horse?)

On 24 December 2015, the Beatles’ back catalogue became available on the
nine major streaming services for the first time, an event that was widely
reported in the press.

Why was this even news?

Well, it’s partly the Beatles’ enduring popularity (70m streams on Spotify
alone in the first three days) and the fact that fans have had to wait so
long to be able to stream their songs online. But it’s mostly that
commentators think they can detect a larger pattern. The Beatles and their
representatives have form for embracing new technology long after their
peers, only releasing their music on a medium at the point it becomes
completely ubiquitous (see CDs in 1987 and iTunes in 2010). The music
industry has heavily invested in streaming being the answer to its current
predicament. And so pundits have been quick to see the Beatles deal as
vindicating this decision — one industry analyst quoted in the Financial
Times saw it as evidence that ‘2016 is a coming of age for streaming’.

It’s undeniable that streaming looks set to grow and grow, both in
absolute terms and in relation to the rest of the industry. But this has
been apparent for some time and as such the importance of the Beatles deal
for the streaming services has probably been overstated — according to the
IFPI, streaming already made up 27% of the industry’s digital revenues in
2013 and 32% in 2014.

In addition, while the press has painted the timing of the deal as
particularly meaningful for the streaming services (2016 as a ‘coming of
age’), I suspect that this has largely been determined by other factors.
Giles Martin has suggested that the sound quality offered by streaming has
only recently reached a level acceptable to the Beatles camp. The
announcement has surely been staggered so as not to affect sales of the
recent vinyl reissues (just as the iTunes release followed a year after
the 2009 CD reissues). And although it was never made public exactly how
long Apple would retain the exclusive right to carry the Beatles’ music
online, it is possible that the Beatles’ representatives have only
recently been free to do a deal with the streaming services, even if the
appetite was already there. Add to that the time that the deal is likely
to have taken (given the number of parties involved and the difficulty of
agreeing contractual royalty rates), as well as the obvious commercial
sense of further delaying the launch until the Christmas period, and it is
possible that the timing of the deal may have less to tell us about the
current state of the music industry than has widely been suggested.