One less band is unavailable to the millions of people who pay to access music. As of Tuesday, the Eagles catalog can be found at music subscription services such as Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio and Deezer.
The nine titles available for streaming include Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, Eagles Greatest Hits Volume 2, Hotel California and The Long Run. All nine titles have been remastered.
The appearance of the full Eagles catalog comes fewer than two months after the group’s catalog signed an exclusive retail deal with Walmart in 2005.
Although the Eagles’ catalog was not given to any one service exclusively, sometimes a subscription service will obtain exclusive rights. Last year, Spotify obtained exclusives on the catalogs of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica. Rhapsody was the first to get Taylor Swift’s latest album, Red.
Subscription services try to lure holdouts without throwing money at the problem, but grabbing an exclusive can be an effective way to stand out from the competition. “Zeppelin and AC/DC and a couple of these very rare and certainly dwindling holdouts do represent unique opportunities to compete on content — at least for a limited, exclusive period of time,” a subscription executive told Billboard in February.
Although long-term holdouts are becoming rarer, artists — typically on independent labels — routinely hold back their titles from subscription services one or two weeks after their initial release. Recent albums by the National, Vampire Weekend and Queens of the Stone Age were first released to brick-and-mortar and digital retail before being made available to subscription services.
