Six months after The Beatles’ music launched on streaming services, their streams have passed the 1 billion mark. A team-up with the Cirque du Soleil also sees the release of a new video based around While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
According to the Music News site, which broke the story, 1 billion streams equates to US$17 million in royalties based on the current .0017 per stream figure used by the industry But given how long The Beatles’ company Apple Corp. held off from streaming, it should be accepted that the Fab Four have a higher streaming rate than most.
On December 24, 2015, their music became available on the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Pandora. They launched with 13 UK studio albums along with Past Masters (Volumes 1 & 2), The Beatles 1962-1966, The Beatles 1967-1970 and The Beatles 1.
The Beatles’ Anthology, Volumes 1-3 came online on April 4, followed by the Love album on June 17.
In March 2016, Spotify revealed the iconic British band had notched up 6.5 million listeners each month on its service since December 2015. Of these, 67% of them were aged under 35. The total time that Beatles songs were streamed on Spotify in the 100 days following launch added up to 2,793 years.
Spotify also pointed out The Beatles had been more popular on its platform than Sia, Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande and 5 Seconds of Summer - all of whom topped the US Billboard Top 200 albums chart in recent years.
This week, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Cirque du Soleil’s Love show in Las Vegas (at the Mirage Hotel & Casino), Apple Corp and Cirque have created a brand new video for the acoustic Love version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
Reporting from inside the Australian music business since '94.
The song was originally written by George Harrison for the Beatles White Album (1968), featuring an uncredited Eric Clapton on weeping lead guitar. Harrison was inspired by the Chinese I Ching (The Book Of Changes). He explained, "it seemed to me to be based on the Eastern concept that everything is relative to everything else, as opposed to the Western view that things are merely coincidental. Everything has a purpose.
"While My Guitar Gently Weep was a simple study based on that theory. I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book – as it would be relative to that moment, at that time. I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw "gently weeps", then laid the book down again and started the song.”
The new video, premiering exclusively on Vevo, is a tribute to Sir George Martin who produced the Grammy-winning Love soundtrack by mashing Beatles songs. It was directed by performance artists Dandpunk, Leah Moyer and Andre Kasten.
Throughout the video, Dandypunk’s hand-drawn illustrations connected Loves performer, Eira Glover, with projected imagery in a series of ethereal settings. All effects were created using projection mapping and captured live, in-camera. No post production CGI (computer generated imagery) was used.
The Love recordings, done with his son Giles Martin in 2006, were Sir George’s final sessions.
More than 4500 performances have been staged of Love by Cirque du Soleil to a total audience of 8 million. Love will stage a special 10th anniversary celebration performance on Thursday July 14.
Although The Beatles broke up in April 1970, their current sales demonstrate they continue to draw new fans. As of February 2014, EMI Records put their total global sales on all formats at 2.3 billion. Of these, 209.1 million werte from the United States, 13.6 million from Canada, 7.6 million from the UK, 7.3 million from Germany, 3.1 million from France, with Australia coming in as the band’s sixth biggest market with 2.8 million.
In America since 1991 the band shifted 65,224,000 physical albums and 14.6 million digital tracks. Between 2000 and 2009, The Beatles were the second highest selling artists after Eminem. By the year 2009, their 1 hits compilation sold 31 million globally and still shifts 1000 a week in the U.S.
As part of their online presence, The Beatles get 30,000 Wikipedia page views a day, according to music analytics company Next Big Sound. Within a three-month frame, they got 25 million YouTube views in the US, have 38 million Facebook likes and their official Twitter has 2 million followers.
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Reporting from inside the Australian music business since '94.
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