Move over Ed Sheeran, The Beatles have taken over Spotify. In the first hundred days that the Fab Four has been available on the popular streaming music service, fans have listened to 24 million hours of the band’s music.
In case you’re wondering, that’s the equivalent of 2,793 years (or approximately one million days) of continued playback, according to Forbes. The band’s catalog has approximately 6.5 million monthly listeners, and listeners streaming the band’s most popular “album,” the greatest hits record One, total over 100 million alone.
Interestingly, it appears that most of the fans lapping up the lads from Liverpool are younger listeners. According to the data in the report, 67 percent of those listening to The Beatles on Spotify are under the age of 35. That said, since the majority of Spotify users are below the age of 35 in the first place, the band isn’t exactly struggling with more seasoned ears — 35 percent of 6.5 million monthly listeners, around 2.275 million, is a pretty massive number of listeners on its own.
Since the catalog launched on Spotify in late December, total Beatles plays number somewhere around the quarter billion mark. That’s a staggering number to achieve in such a short amount of time, and puts the band among the most-streamed artists on the service in the 100 day time frame during which their music has been available.
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Everyone expected the band to be among the most popular artists on Spotify when their catalog became available last Christmas Eve, but it seems analysts underestimated the world’s seemingly timeless Beatlemania. This was the group’s first major outing for streaming audiences, and it appears that number crunchers may have misunderstood the band’s still-smoldering popularity among almost all demographics.
As Paul McCartney continues to strive to regain control of publishing rights for the Beatles’ iconic songbook, any plans to pull songs from streaming services will likely be put on hold. At the end of the day, publishing rights are about money, and there are clearly millions of dollars in royalties to be had on streaming services for the band, well into the foreseeable future.