Quote Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey View Post
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.

You're speaking to a somewhat different point; whereas my point was about the music you seem to be saying their biggest influence was that there were four of them who toured as a band, using guitars, bass and drums.

If your argument was that one big innovation of the Beatles was that they were self-contained in the sense that they wrote their own songs, and they were excellent songs, I would agree (though this still doesn't imply the music itself is going to innovative). Musically the biggest in terms of 'sound' was their use of multilayered vocal harmonies, which was a step beyond what others had done before them, and was the part imitated by other bands like the Beach Boys. This refers to their early work mostly as later on they developed much more complex instrumentation and relied less on vocals.

The big innovation of the Beatles (musically) was definitely NOT that they were using guitar, bass and drums almost exclusively. You might as well say they invented the three-chord song or verse/chorus/verse structure. Having guitar, bass drums was pretty much true from the beginning of rock n' roll, regardless of how many of each you had (which basically boils down to how many guitars you used since everyone had a bass and drums. Some focused more on keyboards but guitar/bass/drums was not a new thing at all.

But anyways, back to the point of mine you quoted. If you go back and listen to an early Beatles song, and try to imagine someone reproducing that 'sound' today and thinking it will sell records, it won't be happening (imo). For one, no-one uses the twangy guitar sound these days. For another, the orchestration is very minimalistic compared to today's music which is much more developed in terms of layering. Which is to say, bands today are not trying to copy a sound from a band from 50 years ago. They might nick things here and there but the overall sound is going to be different.