How much of the Beatles popularity can be attributed to technology? They lived in an era where TV was just becoming popular, and it was just possible to reproduce music that was inexpensive enough for the average citizen. These two media, relatively new at the time, combined with the very charasmatic band members, created the phenomenon. Is there any validity to this claim? Please understand that I am not in any way discrediting their talent, but simply wondering how much the new technology and mediums allowed and contributed to them becoming one of the first “modern” household names.
I realize this may be IMHO, mods, do what you will with it.
Jimmie Rodgers was a giant star long before TV. Plenty of folks were able to buy his 78’s. (However, the Depression did lead to a downturn in sales of Hillbilly Music.)
The Bobbie Soxers were screaming for Frank Sinatra long before he appeared in movies.
And TV had been popular for some years before the Beatles hit. In fact, Elvis made quite a stir…
The Beatles were a pop culture phenom to be sure, but I tend to feel a great deal of that was an extention of their talent rather than technology. That technology was well in place by the time they came on the scene in 1963 (in the U.S.) And it never carried anyone else to the rareified heights that the Beatles achieved.
I feel your suggestion might be more valid for Elvis than the Beatles. He did indeed ride the early rock’n’roll radio station wave. He was one of the earliest rock’n’rollers to appear on national television and his movies were specificly designed to reach his fans.
The repeated innovations of the Beatles, I think, had more to do with their success than the conjunction of technology. To be sure, they took advantage of it, to a certain extent, but no more than Buddy Holly and the Crickets, The Dave Clarke Five, Dion and the Belmonts, Herman’s Hermits or Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.
If you want technology-shaped musicians, check out the Monkees.
They became famous on the strength of their songwriting. Sure, TV gave them a boost in the states, but how many telegenic and forgettable bands have come and gone since then? It’s all about the songs!
1964 was way too late to talk about “just” possible.
Our aptly named TV time is correct when he mentions Presley, who took advantage of television almost a decade earlier.
By 1964 virtually all households had the technology. It wasn’t anything new or special. After all, the first Ed Sullivan show got, IIRC, 73,000,000 viewers. TV was a mature art by then.
It’s true that improving technology helps spread information and performances by artists over larger areas, thus garnering larger audiences for a few performers at the expense of local talent (and not always “better” talent, I hasten to add. Sometimes a second-tier talent with better publicity and access to the media will do a lot better than a superior talent without that). But this sort of thing has been going on a long time. Radio and records and movies made nationwide stars of folks like Bing Crosby and before him Rudy Vallee and before him folks Eve knows far better than I.
Heck, before modern sound reprodyuction you could claim that better transporation lead to larger audiences in the big cities for performers based there.
But to say that the Beatles were the first to achieve widespread popularity because of technology seems pretty far off the mark.
The Beatles certainly were helped by the by-then-well-established TV medium, but as others have mentioned, they were really a “perfect storm” type of convergence of talent, looks, charisma, media exposure, and a populace that was ripe for something new and different after the JFK assassination.
It seems my time frame was slightly off, not to mention the popularity of radio and AB.
Maybe it stems from the same reason I asked my dad if there were cars when he was growing up. He still teases me about that one, and it was over 15 years ago (I’m 24)!
Dont confuse the technology with the social/cultural phenomenons that it enabled.
TV had been popular for 10 years , and was no longer a new technology when the Beatles arrived. But what was new was the social impact of television. People had not yet gotten used to the idea that TV could change society, because its close-up impact in your living room made you feel part of the action.
(For example, the civil rights movement–which probably would not have succeeded as quickly without TV. )
The Beatles’ musical impact would have been huge without TV. But the Beatles’ cultural impact would have been much less. If the Beatles had happened with 1950’s level technology, there would have been lots of records sold–but there wouldn’t have been massive waves of screaming teenage girls running through airports.
The last part was US-centric, I concur, but it can be argued that their sudden explosion of popularity in the US is what really put them in the stratosphere.
I do wonder what their trajectory to worldwide superstardom would’ve been had they not appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show when they did. Would they have been on some other show two weeks later and have the same thing happen? Hard to tell.
As a child of the late fifties and early sixties, I first heard the Beatles at the laundromat, via a jukebox, waiting for our clothes to dry. Nickel a song, three for a dime.
Well, a band isn’t in the stratosphere if it’s ignored in the US so I won’t argue against that.
Using my impeccable gift of hindsight it’s easy to see that they were always going to succeed. An August 1963 concert at the Queen’s Theatre in Blackpool is the only gig I’ve ever attended where it was impossible to hear any music at all due to audience screams and general hysteria.
My mum had a job there and got me a couple of free tickets.
I saw them in the flesh just the once, in August 1963, with Ringo in the seat. The theatre was not large but the place was packed to the rafters with teenagers, mainly young girls. Immediately the band walked on stage the screaming began. You just could not hear any music throughout the set bar the occasional drum and bass line. We were surrounded by mass hysteria. It didn’t stop until the concert ended. Truly mind-blowing, and not a little scary.
They first came to my attention in (I think) October 1962 when they had a 3 minute slot on a north-west news/magazine programme called Scene At 6.30. They played Love Me Do which, to my 14 year old mind, was the most exciting piece of music I had ever heard. I think I was seduced by the harmonica.
The next day at school it was all anybody could talk about and the rest, as they say, is history.
