To expand on this point, The Beatles were the first rock (possibly pop (this would include Jazz, folk, blues etc.) act to release an album (A Hard Day’s Night) of 100% original tunes. Prior to then, the singles were put on albums and the filler was typically covers. Also, outside of exceptions like Buddy Holly, the music biz was run like the Hollywood studio system until The Beatles came along. Record companies would have a staff of writers as well people to teach stage craft, public appearances etc. and the bands/singers would play, wear and do what they were told.
My guess is Buddy Holly would have beaten The Beatles to this distinction if he hadn’t died in that plane crash.
Putting out an album of all original compositions would add prestige to the album and people would take it more seriously as something other than a compilation of hit singles (most written by in house songwriters) they already own and filler.
There are any number of jazz albums before The Beatles that had nothing but original compositions. The wording of your statement makes it unclear if you meant to include jazz in the same group as pop.
See Dave Brubeck’s discography for a prime example. Time Out specifically.
I wrote rock act, but inbetween put in brackets the possibility that it could include all pop music. Thanks for the clarrification and will now stick to rock act without the brackets as I wasn’t sure if there had been a Jazz, country, blues etc. album of originals. Blues, country, folk etc. would be unlikely as it’s typical to take old traditional tunes, standards etc., some of them the authors are lost to time and make them your own. But I was willing to believe that a Jazz act had accomplished an album of all originals prior to The Beatles.
Your timeline is nonsense. Just to stick with the famous groups, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, from 1963, was all originals with one traditional folk song adapted by him. Similarly, all the 1962-1964 Beach Boy albums were 90% written by Brian Wilson with the occasional cover or traditional song. Johnny Cash also wrote the majority of his early albums. Buddy Holly was already writing the majority of his songs with Norman Petty. In fact, most people that are famous today for being anything other than pure singers pioneered writing the majority of their own songs from the very beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll. The first example I can find of a person doing an entire album of his own compositions is Chuck Berry’s first studio album, After School Session released in May 1957, seven years before Hard Day’s Night. And that’s without looking at anything but the first names who came to mind.
I’ll bet you’re even wronger if you go outside of rock. I don’t know enough about early jazz to make any definitive comments, but Miles Davis was playing the majority of his own music from the very beginning of his recording career as a lead in the early 1950s. I don’t know which album of his is the first not to use a cover, but nobody fed him anything he didn’t want to do.
It’s true that Motown and the doo-wop groups and Elvis and his imitators were comprised mostly of singers who needed products. But that was already well into the process of changing by the time the Beatles came along. The trend was already toward making money by recording your own compositions.
You’re confusing one aspect of popular music - one still very much in evidence today, thank you Rebecca Black - with the whole business.
A lot of these arguments are about setting a line between BA and AA (Before Albums and After Albums). There isn’t a clear line. CAs (Concept Albums) don’t have a specific definition, and didn’t start with one particular album. It was an evolving concept of what an album consists of. The first 100% original album is going to appear in multiple genres, and even originality varies in significance. Some original works are just derivatives of earlier work or style, others are wholey unique. Some are 100% original, but written one or many people, and performed by others. The radio factor changed over time also, with AM (Amplitude Modulation) transitioning in FM (Frequency Modulation). Rock may have done as much to sell FM radios as FM did to sell rock.
The Beatles changed the landscape by succeeding. They sold albums like hotcakes. Sgt. Pepper was a concept album that sold like hotcakes stuffed with money. The success of the Beatles rose the water level for almost every musical genre. You can quibble about the ‘firstness’ of anything, the Beatles success at these things was unquestionable.
FWIW, The Beatles never had the best selling album for any given year. Granted, soundtracks held that distinction from 1962 to 1965, but Herb Alpert beat Revolver (1966), The Monkees beat *Sgt Pepper *(1967), Jimi Hendrix beat White Album (1968), Iron Butterfly beat Abbey Road (1969), and Simon and Garfunkel beat Let it Be (1970).
That doesn’t diminish The Beatles’ contribution to the popularity of albums over singles, but it does demonstrate that they were part of a larger vanguard that included many other artists and factors, and were not as some would have us think the soul trigger for the transition.
Too bad for the generations of today that don’t have vinyl LP albums in their lives. They are relics now.
But back in the day an album was way cool. For one thing it was big, 12"x12", you could pick it up and hold it and flip it over and in some cases open it like a book. There was art work on the cover, too. Often it would include the lyrics, concert pictures, studio pictures, biographies and stories… etc etc. Some of that still came with CD’s but now that everything is a download you get none of the intimacy.
Don’t get me talking about the stereo systems. Macintosh, Pioneer, JBL, TEAC, KLH, Bang and Oluffsen, Scott. You played your albums on a turntable that used a diamond needle and came out of big speakers built in oak wood boxes. Can’t tell me those little ipod docking stations can produce the sound of the stereo systems of the past.
How true. I sold a bunch of that stuff in the early 60’s and was in that store when some kid came in and asked if we had any “beetles” records. I tried to be polite and told him the only sound effects records we had were trains and race cars to demo the equipment. I suggested the library. He said, “No, they’re a new English rock and roll group.”
Within a few months of that first awareness of them, the place couldn’t get enough Beatles albums.
Altec Lansing “Voice of the Theater” and JBL were the kings of big ass speakers then, but the snobs went for AR (Acoustic Research) and Bozak.
In the US in the early 60s, the recording industry standard was 12 songs on an LP, which in those days albums ran about 30 minutes. The biggest exceptions were classical and jazz, which songs tend to run longer. For some reason the standard was 14 songs an LP in the UK. In 1967, mainly to save on songwriting royalties, the major record companies decided to use 10 songs on most LPs. Of course so many bands by that time were playing longer songs–so the number of songs was how many songs were needed to fill 20 minutes a side.
It’s not that AM tech prevented album rock, it was that FM stations had nothing to lose. Virtually all big time radio stations were on AM in the 60s; FM’s were small time affairs either simulcasting the AM or classical outlets. As noted above, the 1966 FCC decision to prohibit simulcasting in bigger markets left a lot of FM stations scrambling for programming. Young adults are well known for their willingness to spend on audio equipment, which meant they could notice the difference between FM and AM better than most. Heck the sixties were almost over by the time the average listener had stero speakers. So why not emphasize edgier styles of rock if they were one of the few listening to FM?
Guess what happened when the average listeners started listening to FM in the 70s? Rock playlists became far more conservative, matching what the AM stations used to play.
Excellent answers and commentary preceding this post, but I can’t help but chime in, since I lived the era in question.
First, remember that the Long-Play record (33) didn’t exist before the late 1940s, and it didn’t pick up steam until the mid-50’s. The 10-inch 78 record was the standard from ca. 1920-1950, and this meant a single 2-4 minute song. When the 33 was invented, since it was Not Invented Here, RCA tried to compete with the 7" 45, conveniently a 2-4 minute format, too.
So the “single” was pretty entrenched even into the 1950’s; changing from 78 to 45, but still a single.
Albums (33s) were common for jazz (long solos), classical (long works), broadway (original casts) and general pop (multiple cuts), but rock n roll was still 45-oriented. RnR albums were typically built around a hit single (many groups only had one hit) and were intended to add to the profit, but not designed as an artistic concept or major seller. I have a collection of 1957-1961 45’s, but no RnR albums.
RnR albums…this is where Sergeant Pepper broke the trend.
Yes, he’s considered one of the major influences of what would become Rockn’ Roll, but that album is classified as Rythm and Blues. Also, the album is a compilation of singles recorded over several years and sessions, rather than sitting down and writing 10-12 songs specificaly for an album in a defined period (allegedly two weeks in The Beatles case) of time for a specific artistic endeavour, a movie.
Some of those songs on the Chuck Berry “album” were on the Billboard charts two years previously.
However you want to slice it, it’s just further proof that The Beatles were one of the first (but most popular at the time), if not the first Rock band to treat an album as a creative entity rather than a larger format to hold all their singles plus filler.
Yaaaaah, welllll, if you didn’t reply like such a twit and if your reading comprehension was better than a grade one level, I might be bothered to respond to your points. Try again and maybe I’ll reply.
LOL, btw, at your comments about artists recording their own compositions. Yah, the top 40 is full of them. LMAO!!!
But it’s not as if the songs are in the style of another band–they’re scattered every-which-where as the band the Beatles already were naturally and logically branched out into new directions.
Also, once they were able to have their say in the matter, quite early on, the Beatles paid great attention to song order on their albums. They weren’t aware of Capitol’s reordering at first, and when they found out, their response was the notorious “butcher” cover for Yesterday and Today.
It’s one of the greatest albums that was ever recorded, or ever will be, but it got inaccurately labeled a “concept album” for lack of any other idea quite what to call it, and that term kept getting repeated until it became unquestionable.
Vinyl sales have actually been picking up in recent years. It’s seemingly de rigueur for indie acts and especially dance music artists to have vinyl releases. I got my first record player last year.