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8.20pm
21 March 2015
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“Beatles did not revolutionise music, study claims”
http://www.theguardian.com/mus…..t-51603327
Some ill-informed churnalism, that may be of interest
8.28pm
Moderators
15 February 2015
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From the article:
Mike Brocken, a senior lecturer in music at Liverpool Hope University and director of the world’s first Beatles masters degree, said: “Popular music cannot be ‘measured’ in this way – what about reception, the political economy, subcultures? So my first instincts are to question any study that uses the dreaded data analysis.”
What he said.
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8.30pm
10 August 2011
Offline Interesting if nothing else.
The fact that Hendrix isn’t on the list of groundbreaking musical achievements says much about the analysis.
No one questions the fact the Beatles started off as an amalgam of 50s styles, but that doesn’t detract from their greatness.
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Beatlebug"Into the Sky with Diamonds" (the Beatles and the Race to the Moon – a history)
9.58pm
8 January 2015
Offline Man that was a lazy article, it didn’t even link to the study. We’ve no idea how influenced it was by production technique, music theory, or indeed how deeply they looked at genres at all. But if that’s the take-out, it was useless busywork.
edit: and does anyone else besides me think it just a wee bit self-serving that the “Revolution ” for them is hip-hop? They can’t have been looking too hard if they think 1991 is when it got going. Paul’s Boutique was released in 1989, guys and The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels Of Steel in 1981. BAH I say, BAH!
I'm like Necko only I'm a bassist ukulele guitar synthesizer kazoo penguin and also everyone. Or is everyone me? Now I'm a confused bassist ukulele guitar synthesizer kazoo penguin everyone who is definitely not @Joe. This has been true for 2016 & 2017 
but I may have to get more specific in the future.
11.12pm
11 November 2010
Offline Even if they are right, I don’t think that that’s necessarily saying anything negative about the Beatles. They took the influences around them and combined them to make something enjoyable. Nothing in any branch of the entertainment industry is wholly original, but who cares?
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BeatlebugI'm Necko. I'm like Ringo except I wear necklaces.
I'm also ewe2 on weekends.
Most likely to post things that make you go hmm... 2015, 2016, 2017. 
9.18am
21 March 2015
Offline Here is a link to the study
The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010
http://matthiasmauch.de/_pdf/M…..0-2010.pdf
And the key paragraph;
“3.5. The British did not start the American Revolution of 1964 Our analysis does not reveal the origins of musical styles; rather, it shows when changes in style frequency affect the musical structure of the charts. Bearing this in mind, we investigated the roles of particular artists in one Revolution . On 26 December 1963, The Beatles released I Want To Hold Your Hand in the USA. They were swiftly followed by dozens of British acts who, over the next few years, flooded the American charts. It is often claimed that this ’British Invasion’ (BI) was responsible for musical changes of the time [36]. Was it? As noted above, around 1964, many styles were changing in frequency; many principal components of the topic frequencies show linear changes in this period too. Inspection of the first four PCs shows that their evolutionary trajectories were all established before 1964, implying that, whereas the British may have contributed to this Revolution , they could not have been entirely responsible for it (figure 6a). We then compared two of the most successful BI acts, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, with the rest of the Hot 100 (figure 6b). In the case of PC1 and PC2, the songs of both bands have (low) values that anticipate the Hot 100’s trajectory: for these musical attributes, they were literally ahead of the curve. In the case of PC3 and PC4, their songs resemble the rest of the Hot 100: for these musical attributes, they were merely on-trend. Together, these results suggest that, even if the British did not initiate the American Revolution of 1964, they did exploit it and, to the degree that they were imitated by other artists, fanned its flames. Indeed, the extraordinary success of these two groups—66 Hot 100 hits between them prior to 1968—may be attributable to their having done so.”
[36] When the Brill building met Lennon?McCartney: Continuity and change in the early evolution of the mainstream pop song Jon Fitzgerald Popular Music and Society Vol. 19, Iss. 1, 1995
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