You’ve got to regard the global impact the Beatles had and still have. I’m from Germany, and my parents (born in the thirties) don’t care shit for rock/pop music. Ask them about this Garth Brooks guy (and, for that matter, about U2, Justin Timberlake, Bruce Springsteen or almost any other name mentioned in this thread), and they’ll draw blank. But of course they’ve heard of the Beatles, as well as of Elvis or Michael Jackson. These were not mere mega-successful artists, they were global pop phenomena.
Bing Crosby was big in the early 30’s.
The Beatles? BAH! At their pinnacle, in 1969, with arguably their best album – Sgt Pepper – fresh for the taking, and changing music, the freakin’ Archies Rick Rolled the USA with “Sugar”.
SUGAR! 1969’s biggest hit. 
I’m still waiting for another Italian Renaissance. What? We only need some of the most incredibly talented people in a very specific field to converge at the right place during the right time in a vast expanse of history. Should I stop waiting?
I agree. I would frame the OP another way: what are the big vectors of cultural change and who are the Beatles’ equivalent within that context?
As I do on all of these threads, I come back to the same thing: what rock music was back then, the internet has been for the past 15 years. The web is the thing that parents usually don’t understand as well as their kids and that parents are afraid of when they see the change impact it is having on them. The kids just see it as a way to express themselves and come together.
So The Beatles are, I dunno, perhaps Steve Jobs, with Bill Gates as Elvis. Jobs started in his old-school pop phase, building on Elvis’ success with straight-up rock tunes, like Apple did with personal computers. But then he completely changed the game, designing not just new categories, but full ecosystems around them…
I remember seeing a “SD” type book in the mid1980s with questions like this and “Why is the Mona Lisa so famous”. The authors point was media was more concentrated. three networks and all that. Plus with radios being dial, many people would set the dial on one station and leave it there. “Yesterday” was a huge hit and all kinds of “good music” artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Andy Williams recorded it, as well as non singers like David McCallum to try to get the teenyboppers to listen to them. But later, with music fragmentation, if someone had come out with an acoustic song with a violin, it would only be a mild hit on some MOR station.
I guess you also had two songwriters with talent that complement (John more the lyricist, Paul more the musical although both could overlap), George who had some talent and Ringo was kind of the sad face that American kids love (like Dopey of the Seven Dwarves, according to Albert Goldman in his negative book on Lennon).
I also wonder if the demands of the industry (four singles and two albums a year) forced them to innovate (or allowed all their ideas to come out). Nowadays an artist releases maybe one album every three years.
Wha…?
Should we be waiting for a punchline… or a whooshing sound?
I’d agree with the notion that the only artist since '71 to reach the sort of worldwide recognition on par with that of The Beatles was Michael Jackson. The key to Jackson’s success was that he appealed to such a broad range of people; he enjoyed huge success among both Black AND White audiences, and he did so without the taboos that were associated with Elvis (we love Elvis now, but his early material was considered somewhat risque in its time, at least as far as the idea of impressionable White teens listening to him was concerned). Thriller is still the top-selling album of all time.
Ian Whitcomb’s uncle wrote “Lady of Spain.”
Some of us remember Ian as a one hit wonder with “You Turn Me On.” But he’s had a long & varied career in music & writing. His After The Ball is a well-regarded history of American pop music & would be of interest to most people interested in this thread…
Of course there’s been another Beatles. Its Oasis, silly.
Hey - Liam’s new band Beady Eye has a new CD coming out called *Different Gear, Still Speeding * - some of the stuff I have heard is really good! 
It’s been 400 years. Why hasn’t there been aother Shakespeare?
Some events just happen once, when the time, culture, and talent manage to conjoin.
I feel like we’ve discussed this recently. As the others have said, there won’t be another Elvis or Beatles because we no longer have a mass pop culture.
I think I read in an interview that the band name was partially chosen because it would show up right next to The Beatles in a catalog.
Show a little patience, please. It takes a bit longer than 400 years to get an infinite number of monkeys seated at their typewriters. 
HuffPo article here: 10 Bands Shaping the Post-Nirvana Era. by Jeff Pollack, some music guy.
The list in alphabetical order:
- Arcade Fire
- Coldplay
- The Dave Matthews Band
- Death Cab for Cutie
- Green Day
- Linkin Park
- Muse
- Pearl Jam
- Radiohead
- The White Stripes
First observation - other than Radiohead’s evolution into avant-garde-colored music and The White Stripe’s post-modern, Primitivist take on primitive blues/rock, oh, and maybe Linkin Park’s innovation of nu-metal, which has already come and gone, thank Og :rolleyes: - not a lot is going on here. Green Day takes punk to an evolutionary gigantism point with the rock opera structure - no place to go there. AF, Coldplay, DMB, Death Cab, Muse and PJ are merely examples of existing genres…some of which I would like to stomp out of existence, but that’s my problem.
I mean this in the nicest possible way as a huge, huge music fan - but who cares? I hate the fact that I don’t have to pay much attention to the music scene right now…I mean, the Arcade fuckin’ Fire is my new hope? Don’t get me wrong, they’re just fine - but no new ground is being broken.
Second observation - sigh, so little love for “The” these days…
I don’t think it’s a whoosh.
Brooks is the second-best selling solo artist in U.S. history (behind Elvis by a narrow margin). He was far and away the hottest musical act of the 1990s and grew Country Music’s audience with his crossover appeal.
While I think there’s a valid argument to be made, my gut says no, Garth Brooks is no Beatles. He was hugely popular, yes, and might still be if he hadn’t stepped out of the spotlight. He clearly influenced and inspired a generation of performers to follow. But I don’t see the same level of pioneering, innovation, and staying power that sets the Fab Four apart.
(Oh, and Chris Gaines ≠Sgt. Pepper.)
Garth who?!
He’s to country what Arthur Godfrey was to the ukulele*
*yes that is a meaningful reference. Godfreywas the most freakin’ popular guy on radio for over a decade in the 40’s - 50’s and his playing of the uke ushered in a huge wave of popularity at the time. Is he discussed now?
I blame Matt Johnson for that.
With the number of important news stories from Japan to Wisconsin to Libya going on across the world, there’s only one singer consistently on the top of everyone’s minds.
With the sheer number of multi-media options available today, there’s only one person who can gather 47 million people together in the space of a week to hear her music.
While everyone is downloading bit torrents for free across the interwebs, there’s only one singer with a consistent record of having every produced song cracking the iTunes 100 top downloads.
There is another Beatle. Her name is Rebecca Black.
justin timberlake – lol lol lol!