Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

It’s more #1.

I can appreciate the poetry of the Beatles, I feel a connection as Irish diaspora, but as music, it does nothing for me, and my friends who really loved them picked that up from their parents, reinforcing #1!

View on HN

The Beatles and the 60s really were special. You may not like their music and that's fine, but that period and that band has not been replicated in later decades by later generations. What the Beatles achieved in particular is arguably unparalleled. If it was mostly #1 as you say then there'd be a Beatles perhaps every decade, but there's not been. There's not even yet been another Beatles since the Beatles.

That is a good point. But there is something else going on in addition. Music is a much smaller cultural force than it was in the 60s and 70s. Then it was arguably the core of all the social changes. That hasn’t been true since then. Instead there are PCs, cell phones, video games, apps. Music matters far less than it used to.

I asked my daughters what music, from their teen years, (aughts and tens) would be listened to fifty years later, similar to the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, etc. They said none of their music would be remembered, it’s all disposable.

We used to have to buy music in stores on physical media. We had to pay money for that album so I think that helped develop an emotional connection to the artist because we were literally giving them our money. Unless you were rich you couldn't own every album that you wanted so you had to think more about whether you really wanted to buy it.

Today most people pay a monthly subscription to a streaming music service and get unlimited access to millions of songs. I think this decreases the personal connection to music.

There are still devoted fans to musicians that will pay a thousand dollars to see them in concert and younger fans buying music on vinyl records that want a more tangible physical experience but that's the minority.

I agree in and I think the Beatles can never happen again for reasons that are completely independent of the music itself. There was huge change happening at that time, you had this huge youth culture, that for demographic reasons the West has not seen the likes of since, and arguably never again can because of fragmentation due to the internet, and then finally you throw in the best band and some of the best songwriters in history. That's what made the Beatles special, it was also everything else that had nothing to do with them at all.

As Kevin Kelly noted decades ago, "change changes change". There cannot be another Beatles, because several aspects of what made the Beatles special were because they were the first <something>. In particular they were the first music act to go "global" thanks to television, and the first music act to go "global" in an area of relatively affordable flight.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com