Quote Originally Posted by Poopadoop View Post
Mostly I'm referring to the overall sound. A band that sounded like LedZep or the Beatles today wouldn't sell. Of course they can be influenced by them, but they're not going to copy their sound like bands in their own day tried to. E.g., the Beach Boys were pretty much the Beatles writing songs about surfing.
I'm not sure you fully appreciate where pop/rock music was before the Beatles and after the Beatles.
The popularization of the 4-piece touring guitar band is almost wholly attributable to their success using this format.
There were 4-piece bands around prior to the Beatles, but they weren't the norm.

Look at the proliferation of {2 guitars, 1 bass, 1 drum set} bands out there for the past 60 years.

There's an argument to be made that this is nothing to do with the Beatles directly. The Beatles merely happened to be doing the whole band thing during the era of the rise of electronic music, and somebody was bound to stumble upon the whole "We're 4 guys w/ guitars and a drum set" thing. They happened to be the most popular during that era, and their popularizing the format is coincidental.

IDK. We'll never be able to go back and take away their electricity and see if the genre still grew to be as popular. We can't go back and take the Beatles out of the picture and see if the genre is still popularized by some other group. So we're left with these 2 facts: Before the Beatles, the 4-piece guitar band wasn't really a thing, and in the wake of the Beatles, it's dominating the music entertainment industry on a world-wide scale.