At the beginning of the 1980s a former ice-cream salesman called Ted Perry drove a London minicab to raise money for his dream project: the world’s most smartly curated classical record label.

He called it Hyperion, after the Greek sun god, and by the time he died in 2003 it had acquired its own mythology. The Hyperion catalogue contained all of Schubert’s songs, sung by legendary artists accompanied by the scholar-pianist Graham Johnson; all Bach’s organ music, played with bouncy precision by Christopher Herrick; the complete sacred music of Monteverdi, Purcell and Vivaldi, directed by Robert King; and Leslie Howard’s consistently fine 99-CD survey of the complete Liszt piano music.

Under Ted’s son Simon Perry, Hyperion rose even higher in the firmament. Stephen Hough gave us a whole shelf of reference recordings that included the Rachmaninov piano concertos, Brahms’s late pieces and the Chopin Nocturnes. The Canadian super-virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin danced through the thickets of Medtner and Scriabin with a dexterity that made his competitors weep. The soprano Carolyn Sampson and the cellist Steven Isserlis were caught in full bloom; a revivified Takacs Quartet stunned us with every release.

But there was a catch. Many Hyperion CDs, including those in boxed sets with luxury packaging and notes, went out of print ridiculously fast. And Simon Perry wouldn’t allow streaming, denouncing it as a lousy business model for an independent label – which it was. But now he’s sold Hyperion to Universal, which can afford to take the hit. For the first time these magnificent recordings are arriving on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms; there was a big instalment this week and soon they should all be available.

So let’s celebrate the windfall. Here’s a playlist taken from Hyperion titles I couldn’t live without (which is just as well, given how much of my spare cash they ate up).

1. Psalm 78, ‘Hear my law, O my people’, from the complete Psalms of David sung by the St Paul’s Cathedral Choir conducted by John Scott. A long one, but the 20 minutes fly past as it moves with seamless beauty between its eight composers, four of whom were knighted.
2. Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor, in which another knight of the realm, Sir Stephen Hough, displays a nonchalance worthy of Cortot. He can’t resist picking out an imaginary tune with his thumb in one of the refrains, a favourite trick of ‘Golden Age’ pianists.
3. Haydn, the finale from the String Quartet Op. 71 No. 2. The Takacs perform four minutes of contrapuntal somersaults with foot-tapping articulation in luscious sound. (Note to Universal: persuade them to make this part of a complete Haydn cycle, which would be ‘one for the ages’, as they say in Gramophone.)
4. Marx, the first movement of the Romantisches Klavierkonzert. That’s Joseph Marx (1882-1964), who wins the prize for writing the most romantic piano concerto in Hyperion’s ‘Romantic Piano Concerto’ series. The insanely tricky solo part is played by Marc-André Hamelin with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Osmo Vanska. It makes Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto sound like Webern.
5. Martinu, the finale from the Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra. The much-missed Christopher Hogwood directs Bohuslav Matousek, Jennifer Koh and the Czech Philharmonic in a delicious neo-classical dance.
6. Simpson, Symphony No. 8 and another finale, in its only recording by Vernon Handley and the RPO. This is a tough sell but I’m sticking with it, since I’m blown away by the massive motivic force of the composer’s argument. (He loved to argue, did Bob Simpson, especially about the evils of Thatcherism that drove him to spend his last years
   in Ireland.)
7. Villa-Lobos, A Prole do bebe, ‘O Polichinelo’. This lasts just one minute and 18 seconds, after which you’ll have to play it again to check that it’s humanly possible. The pianist could only be Hamelin.
8. Zelenka, Invitatorium from the Divine Office remembering the dead, sung by Robin Blaze and the King’s Consort. It’s written in the mysterious ‘late style’ of this contemporary of Bach’s, with stabbing strings and melting harmonies. Zelenka is my candidate for the greatest composer who isn’t a household name.

As for the long-term future of Hyperion, which Universal implausibly claims will continue to flourish, let’s not worry too much. The new owners should take the opportunity to produce some CD box sets, for which there’s still a market. But the main thing is this glorious data dump. If you have any lingering reservations about streaming music, now is a good time to abandon them.