For those who want to rock out with AC/DC, the band salutes you — as long as you want to buy the tracks through iTunes Music Store. If you use Spotify, Pandora or other streaming music services, you'll have to find your fix of classic rock elsewhere.
After holding out for many years, AC/DC has now made its entire catalog available through the iTunes Music Store. In the past, the band said it thought the music was best enjoyed as an album instead of as individual songs, which is how many people choose to buy tracks on digital download stores .
AC/DC was one of the last big names to hold out from iTunes, which opened in 2003. Led Zeppelin held out until 2007. The Beatles finally made their catalog available in late 2010.
But you still won't find the Australian hard-rock band on streaming music services like Spotify , Rhapsody, Rdio and Pandora. And they're not alone. While you can now buy digital downloads of most major artists, you may not be able to stream them.
Want to stream the Beatles or Led Zeppelin? Pandora Internet Radio has them, but Spotify still doesn't.
When asked about the missing bands, Spotify's head of U.S. communications Graham James told TechNewsDaily, "We want to have every single artist on Spotify and available to our users." But he declined to comment on why some artists haven't made their music available.
Music fans will hardly find Pandora the land of plenty, though. With a catalog estimated at 1 million songs, the Internet radio service trails well behind Spotify, which boasts a catalog of about 18 million songs on demand and through Internet radio stations. And Pandora is falling out of favor with some artists. Many, including Rihanna, Billy Joel and Sheryl Crow, have spoken out against Pandora's recent efforts to lower the royalties it pays to artists for each song it streams.
Sometimes you just have to wait for the latest songs to become available. Artists like Coldplay and Rush withheld their latest releases from Spotify for a few weeks after they made them available for download at iTunes and other digital download stores.