The Beatles Catalog Available for Streaming Christmas Eve

News that the band is finally joining music streaming services was announced Wednesday on TheBeatles.com, NBC News reported.

Napster’s chief financial officer Ethan Rudin said: “The Beatles are the most iconic band in music history and their catalogue is the #1 request from our subscribers around the world”.

The band sold 450,000 albums and 2o million individual songs in its first week on the service, according to Apple.

With or without streaming services, The Beatles have had no problem continuing to market their music to fans, offering a variety of popular remasters, reissues and compilations over the years since their 1970 breakup. Maybe remaining band members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr want to reach a younger audience. The tunes will appear on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal, Amazon Prime, Slacker, Groove, Rhapsody and Deezer. The recordings of the Beatles are now managed by Apple Corps, which is its own management company along with music label EMI.

To celebrate the news, Google offered up a list of the most searched Beatles albums and lyrics.

Taylor Swift removed her whole back catalogue from Spotify a year ago but did agree to stream on Apple Music when it launched in June, while Adele’s new album 25 is not available on streaming. Otherwise, fans could access Beatles songs only via records, CDs and radio stations. Until now, the only places to listen to the Beatles online was on iTunes for a fee or on YouTube, but the latter doesn’t have everything. So now the early albums such as “With the Beatles” and “A Hard Day’s Night” along with later gems like “The White Album, ‘ “Abbey Road” and ‘Let it Be” will be available for streaming.

For smaller, independent musical groups, streaming has come under fire for giving musicians incredibly small royalty payments per stream.