According to the official Beatles website, the streaming services providing the music of the Fab Four will include:

Spotify (both free and premium accounts)
Apple Music
Slacker
Tidal
Microsoft’s Groove
Rhapsody
Deezer
Google Play
Amazon Prime

And you’ll be able to listen to the following albums:

Please Please Me
With The Beatles
A Hard Day’s Night
Beatles For Sale
Help!
Rubber Soul
Revolver
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles
Yellow Submarine
Abbey Road
Let It Be
The Beatles 1962 – 1966
The Beatles 1967 – 1970
Past Masters (Volumes 1 & 2)
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Groove Music is excited to announce that we’re partnering with Spotify to bring you the world’s largest music streaming service. On December 31, 2017, the option to stream*, purchase, and download music from Groove Music will be discontinued. After December 31, 2017, you’ll still be able to listen to your purchased music if it has been downloaded.

Keep your current music collection intact by downloading to your devices any albums and tracks that you’ve already purchased. You can download your purchased music through the Groove Music App until December 31, 2017.

To download your music, open Groove, go to your music collection and select the Purchased filter. Right-click or press and hold your music files and select Download from the menu.

Check out our FAQ for more info on moving from Groove Music Pass to Spotify.* We’ll continue to update the Groove Music app on all Windows devices so you can play the music you’ve purchased and downloaded to your devices or stored on OneDrive.

*If you are a Groove Music Pass subscriber, we sent you a separate email regarding the December 31, 2017 termination of the Groove Music Pass service. Please read that email and FAQ for important details, including details on how you can move your Groove music to Spotify. We thank you for supporting Groove Music.

At the time, Soulful Music contained 467 tracks, all recorded by seemingly unknown artists with very little in the way of online biographies/presence.

You will note: this is an exceedingly large number of tracks for a playlist knocking on the door of Spotify’s Top 10 revenue-making playlists in America.

Even stranger: bewilderingly few people ‘followed’ the playlist.

According to data obtained using the playlist monitoring platform ChartMetric, MBW has discovered that during the third week of September 2017, just 1,797 people followed ‘Soulfu Music’.

What’s more, we’re told the vast majority of these 467 tracks were barely over 30 seconds long; the minimum unit of time needed to trigger a monetized play on Spotify.

...

So let’s bring all of this information together:

- A Bulgarian individual or collective managed to run at least one third-party playlist – ‘Soulful Music’ – which generated so much revenue in September 2017, it landed at No.35 on Spotify’s global 100 chart. (We actually have a testimonial from a further trusted source that ‘Soulful Music’ went on to break the US Top 10 in late September, but we haven’t seen the evidence.)
- However, ‘Soulful Music’ had less than 1,800 followers at the time.
What’s more, each of its 467 tracks were only attracting around 1,200 monthly listeners apiece.
- Considering these numbers, how on earth could ‘Soulful Music’ beat down branded efforts from Sony, Universal and Warner to become one of the biggest playlists in the world?

...

Our sources tell us that the average track duration of the 467 songs in Soulful Music was 43 seconds. (The top third of the playlist – the most visible bit – actually contained the longest tracks, presumably so that, at a glance, it appeared like the list could be legit.)

There are 86,400 seconds in a day.

The potential amount of total ‘listens’ that a single individual premium Spotify account could rack up within this playlist across a 30-day month? If they were playing songs continually, 24 hours a day, seven days a week?

Just over 60,000.

60,000 monetised tracks ‘listens’ across 1,200 premium accounts in the same month period?

A total of 72 million plays.

A conservative estimate of Spotify’s per-track average payout to recorded music rights-holders is $0.004 per play.

Multiplied by 72 million, and you get the potential monthly payout of the ‘Soulful Music’ scam.

$288,000.
What’s more: if bots were being used to skip tracks on Spotify before they finished – at the all-important 30-second monetisation point – you would be able to squeeze in 103m plays across 1,200 accounts in 30 days.

Total potential payout at $0.004 per play?

$415,000.
Now, remember that these calculations are across just one playlist.

Don’t forget that The Bulgarian had at least one other playlist (that we know of) doing comparable numbers.

The only reason he or she got caught was because they were, essentially, too successful.

Eventually, a major label flagged the issue to Spotify, who, we’re told, deleted the vast majority of the 467 tracks in the ‘Soulful Music’ and ‘Music From The Heart’ playlists in October 2017.

‘Eventually’ is a key word here.

Our sources indicate that the scam – and don’t forget we’re presuming it was a scam – was running for four months before action was taken.

Going off our numbers above, that could easily have resulted in a payout, across the two playlists, of somewhere north of $1m.