Familiarity with the music scene immediately prior to the Beatles certainly helps in understanding their impact.
Popular music, with a few honourable exceptions, had become stale and repetitive. This is obviously a personal opinion but a glance at the early 1960’s chart listings will confirm or deny this view.
The Beatles changed all this at a stroke, not only by releasing the first of some seminal recordings but by stimulating a change in musical taste which benefitted other new bands.
The Beatles first No. 1 From Me To You reached this position in the UK in May 1963. From this point onwards, and maybe earlier with Please Please Me, the nature of the chart listings completely changed. The old order gradually disappeared, again with a few honourable exceptions, and shortly afterwards the same thing happened in the US.
It’s also worth noting that some Beatles fans are now in their sixties, or older for all I know. I don’t often agree with T. Blair Esq., but he was bang on when he said that the Beatles formed the background music to his life, and the lives of his contemporaries.
The switch in CNN coverage, and that of other broadcasters, from war to George Harrison tells its own story. The Beatles really were that important.
They represented the zeitgeist of the sixties.