Beatles Collectors Struggle Going Cold Turkey

The holiday season wouldn’t be complete without the Macy’s Day Parade, a trimmed tree and some sort of new Beatles product for hungry fans. During their heyday, the Beatles always made sure there were new stocking stuffers available for Christmas and 2025 is no different.

But alas, the new cut of the Beatles Anthology documentary on Disney+ will only be available through their streaming service. How does one put that in a sock? The tradition of actually stuffing something in a stocking and ultimately putting the attractive DVD or expansive box set on the shelves for display, is becoming a thing of the past.

Songs and movies will no longer clog your hard drives and phones because the only place you’ll be able to access them is through streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Prime, or in this case, Disney+.

Disney+, who owns distributing rights for the revised Beatles Anthology documentary, has released a newly updated (but substantially shorter) version with updated photos, cleaned up audio, crisp video, and a more tightly edited story. Beatles fans generally want more Beatles, not less Beatles, and fans were immediately put off by getting two hours less that what was originally released in 1996. Despite this, fans were largely satisfied with the new telling of the Beatles story, which is zippier and is presented in nine easily digestible episodes for future generations to consume. What they are not okay with is not being able to purchase a physical Blu-Ray or DVD of the new release.

Though some naive fans have visions of an extended directors cut on Blu-ray, more realistic fans see this digital-only release as a turning point in Beatles history where physical memorabilia will cease to be produced by the Beatles company Apple. This is a hard concept for 20th century fans to grasp but one must also understand that we live in a strange time where 50% of people purchasing vinyl records do not have a record player. The vinyl resurgence seems to be an exercise in ‘collectorism’ – not media preference – a statistic not lost on corporations like Apple.

The vinyl market which peaked in 2023 has had successive negative sales years since, suggesting that the hipster fad of owning vinyl without actually opening the shrink wrap is fading.

Why would someone purchase a vinyl album without a record player? Simple. There is no need to play something as cumbersome as a record album when one can simply touch a phone app and have it play directly into their Bluetooth earbuds which seem permanently attached to people’s heads. What counts is having the album in their collection and displaying it prominently for vinyl hipster validation. It’s also important to note that over 500 Beatles YouTube channels (an approximate count by ChatGPT) rely on physical product to unbox and display on their channel. Unfortunately most YouTubers don’t have the verbal skills to describe something that exists in digital format alone. Consequently the physical album is a vital crutch for their ‘show and tell’ presentations. Translation: more physical albums means more videos, which leads to more views, and ultimately more money for the content creator.

Diehard Beatles fans, who by and large still have a depression-era mentality of stockpiling pop culture items as if their lives depended on it, are loathe to accept these changing times, clinging to their trinkets as if they “can take their collections with them.”

The music industry is aware of Beatles fans weakness of will but the dwindling fan base has reached the point such that corporations like Apple can no longer depend on physical media as a means of improving the bottom line. The only Beatles project on the horizon that Apple will admit to is a 4-part biopic on the Beatles due out in 2028. So what will Apple offer in the two and half years until the biopics come out?

What they have delivered the last two years has been two video releases available only via streaming on Disney+ (the 1970 film Let It Be and the pitiful Beatles ‘64 documentary), a strange re-imagining of the Beatles Red & Blue Albums (1962-1966 & 1967-1970 Greatest Hits classics), and a ropey ‘final single,’ Now And Then, based on a rough Lennon demo cobbled together by the remaining Beatles. Apple has known all along that fans have been demanding the release of a deluxe box set of Rubber Soul since Revolver: Special Edition was released in fall 2022, but their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

Beatles fans are keen to point out that there are eight remaining albums that have yet to get the deluxe box set treatment. Any combination of those would all be likely release candidates to fill in the gap between now and the 2028 Sam Mendes biopics, but Apple has been mum on its intentions.

New CEO Tom Greene’s entire professional background is in the digital space which includes six years with the Harry Potter franchise, growing the Harry Potter Fan Club to over 50 million members and most recently as COO of BLAST, an esports company that includes BLAST.tv and BLAST Premier. In short, there is not one molecule of physical matter for purchase in any of Greene’s past roles, so it’s obvious that the direction Apple intends to go is 100% digital.

Beatles fans, known for their gluttonous appetite for physical product, will soon be on a strict diet of ones and zeros that may tip the scales away from their first world problems toward reflection on the Beatles massive contribution to music and pop culture and why we’re so loyal to them 55 years after they stopped making music.