AC/DC Goes Streaming!

The Australian rock stars, who began selling their music on iTunes only three years ago, will join a variety of subscription streaming music services as early as Tuesday, including Spotify, Rdio and Apple’s new service, Apple Music, according to a number of people with knowledge of the band’s plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

AC/DC — which has sold 72 million albums in the United States alone, according to the Recording Industry Association of America — has long been one of the biggest holdouts in the digital music market. After Apple’s iTunes store opened in 2003, some major artists resisted becoming a part of it, saying that they did not like having their albums split into individual tracks to be sold. (And, whether they said so or not, these artists stood to lose lucrative CD sales if fans bought only the songs they wanted, rather than a whole album.)

But Metallica finally joined iTunes in 2006, Led Zeppelin in 2007 and the Beatles in 2010. AC/DC waited until late 2012 — well after the arrival of Spotify — to join the download world, and the band’s latest album, “Rock or Bust,” released in November, was its first new record to be sold digitally. It has since sold more than 500,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen.

Other big rock acts have already joined the streaming era. Metallica took the dive in late 2012, and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd joined the year after. But while many streaming services are now competing with one another for exclusive content, AC/DC is making its music available to a number of major providers.

Source: New York Times
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