Rejoice! Only 7 months after launching, Adele's 25 is now on Spotify

Adele
Adele, streaming her tunes on Spotify.

Good news, Adele fans: her latest album 25 is available to stream on Spotify as of today. That is, if you didn't buy it back in November when it actually came out. It's hitting Apple Music, Google Play Music, Amazon Prime and Tidal at the same time.

It's the latest example of high-profile artists holding back their tunes from the big streaming services, at least initially - the likes of Taylor Swift and Radiohead have expressed misgivings about the way Spotify et al reward artists.

YouTube is being targeted by the music industry too: musicians including Paul McCartney and Lady Gaga are petitioning the US government to receive a fairer share of the proceeds from illegal uploads of their songs to the site (all those homemade road trip movies with a Coldplay backing track, for example).

Crossing the streams

"I know that streaming music is the future, but it's not the only way to consume music," Adele told Time magazine last year. "I can't pledge allegiance to something that I don't know how I feel about yet." The three singles Hello, Send My Love (To Your New Lover) and When We Were Young were already on Spotify.

Even without appearing on streaming platforms (or perhaps because of its absence), 25 broke first-week sales records when it launched, Billboard reports. With streaming data now included in US and UK charts, it could get another bump this week.

It remains to be seen how Spotify, Apple Music and other services can keep attracting the big names - the idea of keeping major album releases for paying customers has been mooted, while Beyoncé's Lemonade was briefly available as an exclusive on Tidal.

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David Nield
Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.