r/beatles • u/Sorry_Another • 2h ago
Discussion If their first album flopped…
Does anyone have any idea what they would’ve done?
Is there evidence they were in it for the long haul, or did they strike gold out the gate and decided it was worth it to keep going?
Bonus question: if they were never popular, what kind of music would they have made? The same, or something different?
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u/harlei7 1h ago
The pipeline of songs they had months after their debut were too strong to fail. Sure the first few singles were not bad, but the charts would not have been able to resist She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand
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u/ReporterFeisty4619 44m ago
“Please Please Me” and “From Me To You” were also surefire hits from the get-go. They’re great tunes and hugely important in the Beatlemania buildup.
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u/svencutlet 1h ago
What you are asking is to reimagine the last 64 years of musical and cultural history. Without a hit, even a string of hits, they would have fallen into obscurity. I venture to guess no British Invasion, and decades start to unravel…
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u/BirdComposer 1h ago
They would’ve had a hard time getting another record contract. They got lucky with EMI.
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u/Sorry_Another 1h ago
I’ll have to look into how they got that first contract. Sounds serendipitous.
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u/Thespiralgoeson 1h ago edited 1h ago
I firmly believe that if the Beatles hadn't been a rock band, they could have been wildly successful comedy troupe. They were all hilarious. Eric Idle agrees. He said that the Beatles were as funny as Monty Python.
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u/sheet22 1h ago
If it had flopped, they would of had a hard time getting the BBC to play their next singles, except regionally. They would have continued to tour in the North and would have stayed a regional band and signed to a small label.
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u/ReporterFeisty4619 41m ago
Singles mattered much more than albums at that time. As long as they continued having hit singles they would have been fine, and no doubt their second album would still have been a hit.
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u/HistorianJRM85 30m ago
if their first album flopped, it would have meant the rest of England's youth didn't care for Liverpool and were culturally disconnected from them. The Beatles were already the biggest rock band, locally, when they went to record. The problem of low sales would not have been of their own making.
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u/Enough_Passage7926 1h ago
If the album flopped, I’m going to assume the singles flopped too, the sales of which were probably more important, because it doesn’t make sense that the album would do poorly despite hit singles.
If the singles flopped, well then…
Their initial contract with EMI was only for one year. If they didn’t squeak out a hit during that duration, I’m doubtful they’d receive an offer to renew/extend.
If they don’t pack it in, they’d be a typical Merseybeat band.