The Beatles’ eponymous double album from 1968 (more commonly known as The White Album) is a wonderfully messy masterpiece – sprawling through genres and breathless experimentation.
The reissue and remastered album (that originally ran to 30 songs) has now been expanded to an astonishing 107 songs, including outtakes, demos and more. As if an avalanche of Beatles amazingness wasn’t enough in and of itself, it has been given a visual boost.
The Beatles White Album Experience on Spotify is a major melding of audio and video on the streaming service, with two ‘playlist videos’ (one for ‘Back In The USSR’ and another for ‘Glass Onion’) being created from archive images and video footage of the band, all mixed in with animation.
Alongside this, short video montages (in portrait) loop when playing each song on mobile, featuring studio footage of the band making the album alongside other Beatles ephemera.
Spotify says it built the experience using “existing and new Spotify formats” including its Canvas tool for ‘artist expression’, which is currently in beta. The multimedia playlist at the time of writing has over 73,000 followers. The whole thing was a collaboration between Spotify, Apple Corps and Universal Music Enterprises.
“This new multimedia experience showcases Spotify’s continuous commitment to developing innovative new tools for artist storytelling,” runs the press statement on the initiative. “Spotify hopes to continue providing longtime fans a deeper, more personalized look at their favorite musicians as well as exciting a new fan base to discover a legendary album through new products and content offerings.”
In recent years, due to the fixation on the 1960s, it has felt like we are drowning in anniversaries and reissues, but this is unquestionably something that stands head and shoulders above the pack (which is, of course, a very Beatles thing to do…). The band were castigated for a long time for being digital holdouts – their music only landed on iTunes at the end of 2010 and on streaming services at the end of 2015 – but it feels like they (or, more specifically, Apple Corps) are making up for lost time.
