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I think there's another difference too, which is the intense practice. Long before they became famous, the Beatles were working musicians, performing live many
by xamuel 6y ago
I think there's another difference too, which is the intense practice. Long before they became famous, the Beatles were working musicians, performing live many hours a day for years. (And "many hours" was further expanded through the use of performance-enhancing drugs which would be more strictly regulated nowadays.)
Nowadays, there are a lot more distractions. Musicians are too busy working on their social media game to actually work on their music game. And with nightclubs using canned music or one-man DJs, there's a lot less opportunity to perform live even if you want to. This is technological change which harms new music, and it more than cancels out the improvements which technology brings to music.
- lowercased 6y agoit was certainly a lot, but... it wasn't quite as much as myth seems to have it built up to. Mark Lewisohn's "Tune In" does a great job of cataloging all the early year work/practice. There were sporadic months where they didn't play much at all. But yeah, the whole business today is a much different world from the music scene of the 50s/60s. :) The "8-10 hours per night in hamburg" were intense, but they only did a few stints of a few months at a time there. I think Lewisohn added up after their first trip in '61, they had something like... 800 hours of stage time under their belt. It's a lot, certainly, but not the 10000 hour sort of thing people sometimes think. BUT... what's interesting is that there basically weren't any other rock bands at all with that amount of "stage time as a unit" either. It was a relatively new thing altogether, certainly in the UK...