Free as a bird: Beatles makes its discography available to stream online

Consider it an early Christmas gift for your dad: The Beatles will start streaming online.

Starting tomorrow, the best-selling band of all time’s entire discography — spanning more than two dozen albums — can be heard for on all of the major streaming sites including Spotify, Google Play, Apple Music and even Tidal.

And, unlike Taylor Swift, Universal Music Group is making the Beatles collection available for free on the services that have freemium membership levels. 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.

Since revenue from streaming now exceeding downloads, the Beatles couldn’t ignore the tide change if they wanted to distribute their music. The British bands joins other classic rock bands that have belatedly moved their catalog to streaming sites, like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, reports the New York Times.

So, beginning at 12:01 am local time, you can listen to the Beatles in a way they could never have imagined (apologies to John) 50 years ago:

On Spotify, you can finally hear side two of Abbey Road the way we were meant to, with buffering breaks and commercials for Geico.

— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) December 23, 2015