Cultural impact of the Beatles
The English rock band the Beatles, comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, are commonly regarded as the foremost and most influential band in popular music history. They sparked the "Beatlemania" phenomenon in 1963, gained international superstardom in 1964, and remained active until their break-up in 1970. Over the latter half of the decade, they were often viewed as orchestrators of society's developments. Their recognition concerns their effect on the era's youth and counterculture, British identity, popular music's evolution into an art form, and their unprecedented following.
Many cultural movements of the 1960s were assisted or inspired by the Beatles. In Britain, their rise to prominence signalled the youth-driven changes in postwar society, with respect to social mobility, teenagers' commercial influence, and informality. They spearheaded the shift from American artists' global dominance of rock and roll to British acts and inspired young people to pursue music careers. From 1964 to 1970, the Beatles had the top-selling US single one out of every six weeks and the top-selling US album one out of every three weeks. In 1965, they were awarded MBEs, the first time such an honour was bestowed on a British pop act. A year later, Lennon controversially remarked that the band were "more popular than Jesus now".
The Beatles often incorporated classical elements, traditional pop forms and unconventional recording techniques in innovative ways, especially with the albums Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Many of their advances in production, writing, and artistic presentation were soon widespread. Other cultural changes initiated by the group include the elevation of the album to the dominant form of record consumption over singles, a wider interest in psychedelic drugs and Eastern spirituality, and several fashion trends. They also pioneered with their record sleeves and music videos, as well as informed music styles such as jangle, folk rock, power pop, psychedelia, art pop, progressive rock, heavy metal and electronic music. By the end of the decade, the Beatles were seen as an embodiment of the era's sociocultural movements, exemplified by the sentiment of their 1967 song "All You Need Is Love".
Over the 1960s, the Beatles were the dominant youth-centred pop act on the sales charts. They broke numerous sales and attendance records, many of which they have or had maintained for decades, and hold a canonised status unprecedented for popular musicians. Their songs are among the most recorded in history, with cover versions of "Yesterday" reaching 1,600 by 1986. As of 2009, they were the best-selling band in history, with estimated sales of over 600 million records worldwide. Time included the Beatles in its list of the twentieth century's 100 most important people.
Scope
The Beatles formed in Liverpool in 1960. Comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, they gained international stardom in 1964, and remained active until their break-up in 1970. Throughout their career, they expanded collective notions regarding the limits of commercial and artistic achievement. The Rolling Stone ''Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll defined their "incalculable" influence as encompassing "all of Western culture". The writers state that the group's discography held the precedent for "virtually every rock experiment ... Although many of their sales and attendance records have since been surpassed, no group has so radically transformed the sound and significance of rock & roll." Writing for AllMusic, critic Richie Unterberger recognises the Beatles as both "the greatest and most influential act of the rock era" and a group that "introduced more innovations into popular music than any other rock band of the 20th century". He adds:Many contemporary listeners viewed the Beatles as orchestrators of society's developments over the second half of the 1960s. Musicologist Allan F. Moore states that there have been occasions when "audiences gravitate towards a centre" of pop music culture, the most prominent of which was in the early to mid 1960s, a period in which it "seems that almost everyone, irrespective of age, class or cultural background, listened to the Beatles". Music critic Greil Marcus described the Beatles' impact as the second "pop explosion", after Elvis Presley's emergence in the 1950s, and defined the term as "an irresistible cultural explosion that cuts across lines of class and race, and, most crucially, divides society itself by age". In such a phenomenon, he continued, "The surface of daily life is affected with such force that deep and substantive changes in the way large numbers of people think and act take place." According to author and film-maker Hanif Kureishi, the Beatles are "the only mere pop group you could remove from history and suggest that culturally, without them, things would have been significantly different".
Detractors of the Beatles' legacy argue that the band are overrated and are often credited for innovations that other acts were the first to achieve. Music historian Bill Martin cites such notions as part of modern culture's inability to fully "understand them as a force", and says that although rock music has been defined by "synthesis and transmutation" since it began, "what was original about the Beatles is that they synthesized and transmuted more or less everything'', they did this in a way that reflected their time, they reflected their time in a way that spoke to a great part of humanity, and they did all of this really, really well." Ian MacDonald states that the band were keen observers who discovered trends in their infancy and were adept at mirroring the era's "social and psychological changes". He said that their connection with the times was such that the Beatles "did far more mind-liberating" than Bob Dylan, through their greater record sales and "because they worked in simpler, less essentially sceptical ways".
Sales and attendance records
Over the 1960s as a whole, the Beatles were the dominant youth-centred pop act on the sales charts. "She Loves You", the band's second number-one single on the Record Retailer chart, became the best-selling single in UK chart history, a position it retained until 1978. The band's first two albums, Please Please Me and With the Beatles, each topped Record Retailers LPs chart, for a combined run of 51 consecutive weeks. Beginning with "From Me to You" in 1963, the Beatles had a four-year run of eleven consecutive chart-topping singles in Record Retailer, ending when the double A-side single "Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Penny Lane" peaked at number two.On 4 April 1964, the Beatles occupied the top five US chart positions – with "Can't Buy Me Love", "Twist and Shout", "She Loves You", "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Please Please Me" – as well as 11 other positions on the Billboard Hot 100. For nine consecutive weeks, they held the top two places on the Billboard Top LPs chart with reconfigured versions of their first two albums. Until 2018, they were the only act to have filled the top five of the Billboard Hot 100. They also broke 11 other chart records on Billboards singles and albums charts at that time. Their chart domination was commonplace in countries around the world during 1964. In Australia, in late March, the band's songs filled the top six chart positions; during one week, they held nine positions in Canada's top ten.
On 15 August 1965, the Beatles became the first entertainment act to stage a concert in a sports stadium when they performed at Shea Stadium in New York City before an audience of 55,600. The event set records for attendance and revenue generation, with takings of $304,000. The band's record run of six consecutive number-ones on the Billboard Hot 100 from January 1965 to January 1966 – with the songs "I Feel Fine", "Eight Days a Week", "Ticket to Ride", "Help!", "Yesterday" and "We Can Work It Out" – remained unbeaten until Whitney Houston achieved a seventh in 1988.
File:TheBeatles68LP.jpg|thumb|right|upright=0.9|alt=A mostly plain white album cover, with the words "the Beatles" towards the centre and a serial number towards the lower right corner|Cover of The Beatles. The double LP was recognised by Guinness World Records as the fastest-selling album of all time.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the top-selling album of the 1960s in the UK, and on four occasions they had the best-selling album of the year there. As of 2019, with certified sales of 5.1 million copies in the UK, Sgt. Pepper is the all-time third best-selling album there and the best-selling studio album. The 1968 double LP The Beatles became the fastest-selling album in history; Capitol Records reported advance orders of 2 million in the US, with many stores selling their entire stock in one day.
In the UK, the Beatles are beaten only by Presley for their amount of number-one singles and combined weeks at number one. As of December 2018, the Beatles held the record for the most Christmas number-one hits there, with four, of which three were achieved in successive years between 1963 and 1965. In the list of the UK's top sellers for the decade, the band's albums filled the top ten, apart from the soundtracks to The Sound of Music, South Pacific and West Side Story. The Beatles took the next three positions, meaning that all ten of their UK number-one albums were among the thirteen best-selling albums of the 1960s. In the case of US sales for the 1960s, the Beatles were the top artist, ahead of Presley, in both singles and albums. Between February 1964 and July 1970, the band maintained the number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100 for a total of 59 weeks and topped Billboards LPs chart for 116 weeks. In other words, they had the top-selling single one out of every six weeks, and the top-selling album one out of every three weeks.