8 Things The Beatles Pioneered

📌REVISION: I've removed the segment on The Beatles use of music videos. This is because it has now come to my attention that the first example of what we would today call a "music video" was actually most likely made by The Moody Blues two years before The Beatles made their music videos. Sorry for the misleading information!

The Beatles are often touted as "the greatest band of all time", but do they really deserve that title? Well, although their music is truly sensational, to really understand how the Beatles earned their near universal acclaim you need to know how these four boys from Liverpool changed the music industry forever.

SOURCES:
All other interview clips are lifted from “The Beatles Anthology” (1995)

And, an extra special thanks goes to Douglas Lind, Vidad Flowers, Ivan Pang, Waylon Fairbanks, Jon Dye, Austin Russell, Christopher Ryan, Toot & Paul Peijzel, the channel’s Patreon saints! 😇

0:00 Introduction
1:14 Stadium Rock
3:20 Live Music on International Television
5:09 Loops
7:23 Guitar Feedback
9:08 Backmasking
10:01 ADT
11:51 Sitar in Western Music
12:42 Album Covers
13:30 Record-breaking Chart Success

[pgmorrow]

"The Beatles are overrated." This reminds me of the joke about the person who went to a performance of Hamlet and complained that the dialogue was just a bunch of old clichés.

[mattgilbert]

"The Beatles started it, they did it the best, and everyone who came afterwards was a kind of Beatles tribute band"
-Kurt Cobain

[PaulDowsettUK]

The most important one to me, which I wish you'd mentioned, is that they refused to play to segregated audiences, and had it written into their contracts. Racial segregation at music venues quickly declined after that.

[HunterPhenomMakoy]

It’s pretty amazing to think they were only together for 7 years. Even just listening to their evolution of music it’s hard to believe that wasn’t over a 20 year period.

[alexanderlea]

Imagine being the guy that said "as long as they keep making music, they'll last". That's gotta feel good.

[mickeyray]

What I remember most about the Beatles was the "Surprise" element for every album. For other bands, every album repeated a formula, but the Beatles kept innovating and expanding their sound with every album in the sixties. It was always exciting.

[GoTocco]

They were also the first band that could sell records without touring to promote it. This also gave them the freedom to produce songs that could not be reproduced live which opened many creative possibilities.

[brainscott]

"Tomorrow Never Knows" is 3 minutes of pop music's past, present and future all in one song.

[jamesfetherston]

One of their first “firsts” was literally the first few seconds of the first song on their first album. Paul counting in “One, two, three FOUR!” On “I Saw Her Standing There” was the first studio recording released with the count in included.

[navasaband]

Please don't forget that Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick was the first to use compression on drums, slamming a Fairchild 660 to get more energy on to tape. There's also another first by the Beatles: FLANGING: similar to ADT, but not the same, where a signal from one tape machine is duplicated on another and the second tape machine's reels are manually slowed down by putting a finger on the spool causing a whooshing of the audio, now emulated by countless machines and pedals. Thing is, JOHN LENNON coined the term FLANGING. Another first. And there ya go.

[anthonyhill]

I’m now 71 and I would like to say that I feel very lucky to have been a teenager when the the Beatles inspired the world. I can clearly remember rushing home from school to play “Rubber Soul” on my red mono Dansette record player. I would especially play “Girl” over and over. Happy days. 🤔🇮🇪

[flaro]

15:05 that interviewer was expressing his own biased thoughts in form of a question, looking down on the public. And that boy gave an excellent answer.
Amazing video! Thank you

[gamerchief]

So happy to see you are finally giving the beatles some attention, they should be in more videos

[branislavstanisic]

Album “Revolver” when is released, sounded like it’s coming from the future. Even today it sounds very new and fantastically fresh. Nobody matched that achievement and is already past fifty five years ago. Incredible.

[DB]

My favorite Beatles innovation is what we now know as the "music video". The story as I remember from Anthology was that they could not perform on Ed Sullivan, but still needed to promote the new song single - so they recorded a video of them performing and sent it to Ed to broadcast live on his show. Thus, the music video for promotion was born. Long live the Beatles.

[Ambignostic]

They weren't the first, but I think the Beatles also deserve a lot of credit for turning multi-track recording into another industry standard. They turned the studio into an instrument, exploited its possibilities, and transformed the idea of a pop band from "performing artists" to "recording artists."

[HofTheStage]

You're right, most of these things are kinda taken for granted without thinking where they originated from. Awesome video as always, thank you for the incredible information.

[owenmartin]

The beatles arrived just at the right time in history when technology was improving in such a way to compliment their groundbreaking songwriting.

[Brian-bppe]

The Beatles were more than just a band; they were a cultural phenomenon of lasting influence. It didn't hurt either, that their music was and is very durable over time.

[grahamyates]

I was always anxiously waiting for the next record they released to see what they were going to do this time.
They went from 'I Wanna Hold your Hand' to 'A Day in the Life' in three and a half years - no-one since Mozart had hauled the popular music world along in their wake at such a speed.