How many artists' careers did the Beatles kill?

The spike in one-hit-wonders during the 90s wasn't surprising to me. I had the unenviable position of working as a line cook and construction worker during the 90s and listened to the radio 6+ hours a day. It's actually fun to listen to those hits these days. There are so many songs that I've forgotten about that I would listen to over and over again before they were overtaken by a new hit. Superman, burning beds, seether (whatever that was), bands named after boxes and chairs, ten different Eddie Vedders with arms wide open...listening to them now brings back a lot of memories so it's hard to hate them today as much as I did then. I remember exactly where I was (sitting in the parking lot of a Shoney's in Charlottesville, VA) when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit. Typical FM radio before that was hair metal and classic rock.

My favorite, though, was Seven Mary Three. I saw them in Virginia Beach in a bar with no air conditioning, it was miserable but they had some seriously catchy tunes. Less then a year later I was painting a high school in Orlando and the song Cumbersome came on the radio with the announcer stating "can you believe these guys are unsigned???". Not too long after they were all over MTV. Second place goes to seeing No Doubt open for a forgotten band in '91. They were incredible. When I heard I'm Just a Girl for the first time on the radio I knew who it was before being told.

Any discussion of charts after about 2000, and certainly today, seems irrelevant. Music delivery is so segregated into niches (with charts catering to each) that "pop" charts don't reflect a generation's tastes the way they used to.

It's sad that we no longer have soundtracks for eras the way we did. Look at movies set during various decades; you know the time period from the songs being played.

After 2000 or so... that's over. Even if you play period-correct music, it will not evoke memories across anywhere near as much of the audience as it would have for previous generations.

Back in the day, on a road trip with friends, you could have an assorted-music tape where people would know and rock out to every song. Today not so much. Or... you'd be playing the same tape from the '80s to 20-somethings now and they'd still know the songs.

There's a reason '80s music enjoyed such a resurgence among young people: Much of today's popular music sucks ass. It sucks both from a creative standpoint (lacking even legitimate song structure, like melody, chorus, & bridge) and from a technical standpoint (being dynamically compressed into a wall of noise).

The years that are most consequential to my taste are '77 to '82, where there seemed to be an explosion of high quality output across so many genres - disco/uptempo R&B, funk music, hard rock, progressive jazz, punk rock, reggae, synth pop and electronic music -- some of these being emergent genres. But '76 was a pretty full year for music across genres too, as was '83. And '75, and '74, and '84, and '85 ...

There's literally no year that isn't a rabbit hole of very interesting hits, progressions where one thing is going out of fashion while another thing gains attention as it moves from edge to center, marginalia, you name it when it comes to music.

I suppose there are examples of like late '92 when grunge blew up beyond reasonable proportions where one could point to a specific time range and place for a sea change like Nirvana and fellow indy rockers triggering Glam Rock/Hair Metal's decline. But those kinds of events are less frequent or at least less consequential and that probably has to do with the average josephine liking a wide range of musical genres, which was very much not the case until maybe the mid to late 90s.

Seriously, folks' musical tastes were monosyllabic af

Shouts to giving Franky Valli his props. One of my favorites of his songs is a disco groover called "Who Loves You".

Interestingly there was a bit of a resurgence in 50's style and culture during the mid '70s, probably due to the movie Grease's and lead Travolta's success

Like Valli in the article it’s perhaps more amazing who has had multiple decade success. In the UK Cliff Richard has topped the charts in every decade since the 1950’s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Richard

> He holds the record, with Presley, as the only act to make the UK singles charts in all of its first six decades (1950s–2000s). He has achieved 14 UK No. 1 singles, and is the only singer to have had a No. 1 single in the UK in each of five consecutive decades

This article is asking whether a new kind of pop star ends the pop careers of existing pop stars. Seems unclear clear from the top 40 hits data used, but I enjoyed the exploration and would enjoy reading more in depth exploration of the question with more data.

I guess a simplistic relevance survival rate change analysis akin to top 40 hits before/after a shock must've been done for companies or individual careers where the shock is say a new general purpose technology or shift including the one happening now around LLMs. I'm having deja vu while commenting, there is a non-superficial literature on just this focused on adaptation and adoption as important factors if I recall correctly; I'd need to ask a LLM for specifics or rack my brain for longer, the piece that immediately comes to mind is at a different looking at a different scale, Jeff Ding's writing on such shocks and geopolitical power. Anyway, I guess such a literature focused on entertainer survival given shocks must exist, and might help explore which ones matter; the Beatles or any specific megastar might just be the froth; I presume that's the case.

Based on the title I was expecting a different question (entirely due to my presumptions such as mentioned above, nothing wrong with the title or article), namely how many star careers does a megastar career end or preclude, and on down to the impact of stars (mega to small) on amateurs. It's possible that stars are positive sum when considering consumers or even that they are positive sum for smaller producers (increasing overall demand, including demand to create as an amateur) though I'm skeptical of the latter given attention is finite.

I'm way more sanguine about the positive sumness of megastars where demand is insatiable (e.g., not limited by attention) such as for non-attention-based (e.g., media/entertainment) technology, but I'd love to read serious analysis of this either way.

I would definitely watch a film about a quartet of highly trained musical hitmen taking out competing acts. Somehow the idea of John acting as a spotter with a pair of binoculars sat on a rooftop next to Ringo with a sniper rifle and giving him a range estimation in a Scouse accent seems… utterly delightful.

The careers they really affected were artists who signed to Apple.

George Harrison tried his best at producing, but he just didn’t have it. Doris Troy’s album under Apple has very little soul.

Too bad John and Paul didn’t care enough to consistently produce other artists.

1964 and The Beatles didn't just mark a change in music. It marked a change in entertainment in general. An episode of This American Life shows this beautifully: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/281/transcript, look for "Act One, Take My Break Please."

This tells the story of a vaudeville comedy act, a husband and wife team, booked on the Ed Sullivan show, on the day that The Beatles made their American debut. They were completely blindsided. They didn't have any comprehension of what was happening until they were in the middle of it. They didn't really get it until later. The story includes an encounter with John, surreal for the juxtaposition of the ordinariness of the interaction, and the symbolism -- these two completely different eras encountering one another without any awareness of what was represented.

To push the point too far maybe, what was changing was the very sound of life in the US. You hear these old timey comedians, and they have the rapid fire delivery, the tone of voice, the corny jokes, the style that characterized vaudeville and TV sitcoms. And then you have The Beatles, ushering in something brand new (to the vast majority of Americans). I think it's the same sort of difference you see in movies: Before the mid or late 60s you had this very stylized and artificial way of speaking, often with this weird and phony "mid-Atlantic" accent. And then you had much more realistic movies and ways of speaking, e.g. anything from that era with Jack Nicholson.

You can’t talk about kill rates in the 90s without talking about Nevermind. Well you can but it’s irresponsible.

I’d argue nothing successful in rock came out over the next 20 years without somehow relating to nevermind.

The fact that Valli topped the charts again in 1978 with “Grease” still boggles my mind.

Not if you were living through the 1950s nostalgia revival which was going strong at the time and lingered through the early 80s. It was on TV (Happy Days and Sha Na Na), the movies (American Graffiti, Porky's) and a bunch of retro musical acts (The Stray Cats) or retro projects by established artists returning to the music they grew up with (Robert Plant's The Honeydrippers).

The sound of rock music undoubtedly changed between the beginning and middle of the 1960s. But by looking at the Billboard Hot 100, we can see if that change in sound was being made by a fleet of new groups or a bunch of older acts adapting.

This methodology leaves out a lot of bands, and not just the long tail that never cracked the top 100. There are MANY locally popular bands that never broke out nationally and therefore never made it to the Billboard Hot 100. There were also bands doing types of music that never charted particularly well yet were influential in their own way. For a sampling of this, go to the MIT/WMBR archives (https://wmbr.org/cgi-bin/arch) and listen to "Lost and Found" which highlights a lot of these types of music. Or search for things like "60s garage bands" "60s funk" etc. on YouTube.

The author also mentions the 1991 change to the Billboard methodology which really calls into doubt a some of the "hits" that came before. In a nutshell, music charts in the United States were based on a sample of self-reported sales from record store managers. You can imagine the bias and BS that went on with those numbers.

Then there was manipulation further up the funnel. Record companies weren't supposed to give outright cash payments to DJs (wink wink) but there were many other ways of exerting influence on influential media gatekeepers.

Some of the influence was obvious. Picking artists that had the "right" look. Promoting "safe" artists. Forcing hitmaker producers on new and established artists. Selective access and backroom benefits for powerful DJs and music journalists and other influencers. Ignoring, sidelining, or co-opting trends bubbling up from the underground, from proto-metal in the late 60s to punk in the 70s to rap in the 80s.

As soon as Soundscan was implemented, there was an immediate realignment, with rap and grunge and techno and country storming the pop charts.

Background on the 1991 Soundscan change is here, if anyone is interested: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/billboard-soundscan/

Slight tangent:

Listened to "the song that some claim made Dylan go electric and pushed rock music into a completely new direction." I always liked it.

It's profoundly odd that "The Brits," mostly working class youngsters had this impact on american culture, by introducing and merging american themes and styles to americans... by mixing them with other american art memes.

Infusing rock n roll with smokey blues vibes. Putting Beat Generation themes into pop. Three years in and you have american musicians mimicking Liverpool lads doing impressions of an american singers' accent.

...and somehow it's not cheesy. That song sounds like authentic americana... at least to me.

90s were harder on popular artists than the 60s