The Beatles are BY FAR the best selling band of all time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_music_artists
Yes, Kesha is successful but she isn't influential. The Beatles inspired artists all over the world and changed how people listen to and perceive music. Not only that, they changed the way that bands use the recording studio to make music.
Marketing didn't really make them popular. They played in clubs for 3 years before getting popular from Love me Do and Please Please Me. They influenced rock more than any other band, basically making it what it is today. They opened the doors for musicians in america after Kennedys death.
Quote from Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz:
In their initial incarnation as cheerful, wisecracking moptops, the Fab Four revolutionized the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts. Their initial impact would have been enough to establish the Beatles as one of their era's most influential cultural forces, but they didn't stop there. Although their initial style was a highly original, irresistibly catchy synthesis of early American rock and roll and R&B, the Beatles spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers, consistently staking out new musical territory on each release. The band's increasingly sophisticated experimentation encompassed a variety of genres, including folk-rock, country, psychedelia, and baroque pop, without sacrificing the effortless mass appeal of their early work.
There are just so many reasons why they were influential:
- They were one of the first groups to treat an album as a work of art in its own right instead of just a collection of singles
- They for the most part halted the practice of artists making foreign language versions of their hit singles, unofficially making english the official language of rock and roll and all its sub-genres. Klaus Meine of the scorpions said that when they started, the only way they would really make it big was to record in english which was attributed to The Beatles influence.
- They made it fashionable for men to grow their hair long(not really music lol but it sure took a long time for it to die out as a rock fasion)
- They pioneered the big world tours as we know them today.
- They were the first band to actually express their true feelings on major world issues of the time.
- They were the ones who brought the music and instrumentation of india to the west(first western rock band to use indian instruments on record) .
- They were the first rock group to take a stand against segregation.
- One of the first bands to start their own record label.
Ok this is a little much lol but you get the point. You have to take this into perspective, music seriously wouldn't be the same or even as popular as it is today without The Beatles. You can compare things now to their songs that are obviously better, and bands that are obviously more talented than they were but that's really not the point or why they are so popular.
/musicnerd
