How The Beatles completely revolutionised the record industry with one release
An age of innovation, the 1960s was a truly revolutionary period, altering the course of musical history forever more. The Beatles were at the heart of this innovative era, consistently looking to introduce new technologies and recording methods into their sound. Even the fact that the mop tops wanted to write their own material came as a revelation to the music industry of the period, but each and every release only seemed to build upon their inventive, trailblazing approach to production and songwriting.
The Beatles’ advances in music production and technology are incredibly well-documented, from their adoption of early sequencer and tape loop technology to pave the way for multi-track recording. However, the band’s physical releases were just as revolutionary as what was going on in the studio.
When Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in 1967, for instance, the album featured an overarching narrative running through the entirety of the tracklisting. This opened up a whole new world for recording artists, allowing them to craft whole albums that were not just haphazard collections of single songs.
Months prior to the release of Sgt. Pepper’s, the Fab Four unveiled their stunning single ‘Penny Lane’/’Strawberry Fields Forever’. A smash-hit release for the group, the single completely subverted the traditional practices of the music industry up until that point. Not only was the music itself unlike anything else being recorded at the time, but it was released as a double A-side single, something of a rarity back in 1967.
At the time, singles typically featured an A-side and a B-side. The A-side was the track deemed to have the most commercial potential, while the B-side was often a filler song, considered not good enough for an album. In some cases, producers and record executives—such as Rolling Stones and later Apple Corps manager Andrew Loog Oldham—used B-sides to secure more royalties for themselves. Since royalties from single sales were split evenly between the A-side and B-side, adding a writing credit to a subpar B-side could result in a tidy payday.
For a songwriting partnership as strong as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, ‘filler’ songs did not come around too often. So, the solution was simple: release a single with two A-sides. Back in 1965, the band had trialled this practice with ‘Day Tripper’ and ‘We Can Work It Out’, but it was ‘Penny Lane’/’Strawberry Fields Forever’ which cemented the importance of the double A-side in the minds of the music industry.
Every aspect of the 1967 single release was revolutionary in its own right, highlighting the pioneering nature of The Beatles during that particular period in their history. For the band, however, the double A-side was merely a natural continuation of their earlier career. After all, some of their early B-sides included tracks like ‘P.S. I Love You’, ‘This Boy, and even ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. In other words, many of The Beatles’ supposed B-sides rival their A-sides anyway, so creating a double A-side single in 1967 was an obvious choice.
Nevertheless, that obvious choice changed the field of music publication and single releases forever more, with multiple other artists and record companies recognising the potential of having two songs in the charts from one release. The innovation was one of countless groundbreaking changes in the music industry spurred on by The Beatles. They might not have invented the concept of double A-side singles, but they certainly espoused the potential of those releases.
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