Beatles cheers

The Beatles' music is being made available on a wide range of streaming music services.

Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime Music are among nine services that will offer the band's tracks worldwide.

The group split up in April 1970. However, their songs - including Hey Jude and Yesterday - remain hugely popular and influential.

One expert suggested that the move would help their legacy endure.

"In terms of digital the Beatles have always been quite late to the party - they came to iTunes in 2010, which was a good five years after the iTunes Music Store started gaining momentum," said Chris Cooke, co-founder of the music industry news site CMU.

"We had expected they would probably do an exclusive deal to stream their music with one service, but it looks like instead they are going to be pretty much everywhere from day one.

"So, I suppose that is them accepting that streaming is now a very serious, significant part of the record industry."

Other services that have secured the band's catalogue include Deezer, Microsoft Groove, Napster and Slacker Radio.

The deal involves rights to stream 224 songs from the original 13 studio albums released in the UK as well as "essential" collections including Past Masters. The tracks will be made available from December 24.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr clocked up 17 number one singles in the British charts as the Beatles.

But long after the band broke up they continued to issue songs and compilations, the most recent of which was an expanded edition of Beatles 1 put on sale last month.

The Beatles as a corporate entity have been notoriously slow in adapting to new technology. They waited five years to issue their albums on CD, and didn't talk about the download Revolution until 2010 - seven years after the iTunes store launched.