In 1979, John Lennon sat in his apartment at the Dakota in New York and recorded a rough song idea onto a cassette using a boombox, never imagining it would become a Beatles single released more than four decades later. iHeartRadio's Beatles Now And Then stream exists because that recording eventually did, and the station now runs the band's catalog nonstop with the song that saved it at the center.
A Demo Too Rough to Finish
Lennon labeled the cassette "For Paul," and after his death in 1980 it eventually made its way to Paul McCartney, given to him by Yoko Ono in the mid 1990s along with a handful of other home recordings. The Beatles used two of those demos for the "Anthology" project in 1995, but "Now and Then" stalled. George Harrison reportedly dismissed the recording quality outright, and for good reason: Lennon's voice was buried under piano and tape hiss that no analog technique of the era could cleanly separate, according to reporting compiled by Northeastern University.
The Tool That Finally Isolated Lennon's Voice
The demo sat unfinished for nearly thirty years until the team behind Peter Jackson's "Get Back" documentary developed a machine learning technique to strip away background noise and isolate individual voices from old, messy recordings. Applied to Lennon's cassette, the same stem separation process pulled his vocal free from the piano behind it. McCartney described hearing the result for the first time as startling: "There it was, John's voice, crystal clear," he said, according to Northeastern's account of the project. With that vocal isolated, McCartney and Ringo Starr recorded new parts around it and folded in a Harrison guitar take from 1995, finishing a song the band had shelved twice before.
A Premiere Across Hundreds of Stations at Once
iHeartMedia marked the song's release by coordinating something it had never attempted before: a simultaneous world premiere across more than 760 of its broadcast stations nationwide on November 2, 2023, spanning formats from Classic Rock to Country to News/Talk, according to the company's own announcement. Its Classic Rock stations kept playing the track once every hour for the rest of that day. The dedicated Beatles Now And Then stream grew out of that moment, an always-on home for the catalog once the one-day event had passed.
The Grammy That Made History
The song's afterlife turned out to be just as unusual as its origin. In February 2025, "Now and Then" won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance, becoming the first AI-assisted recording to win a Grammy Award and giving the Beatles their eighth win as a group. McCartney was careful to draw a line around what the award actually recognized, insisting "nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It's all real and we all play on it," a distinction that separated the project from the AI vocal clones and deepfakes drawing scrutiny elsewhere in music at the time.
What Plays Now
The station built around that story runs commercial-free, cycling through the Beatles' full catalog around the clock rather than looping "Now and Then" on repeat. For listeners who caught the 2023 premiere on one station among hundreds, or missed it entirely, it offers a way back into a song that took forty-five years, three surviving band members, and a piece of machine learning software to finish.