The Beatles, Elvis, even Dylan played a lot of covers of old blues tunes or other songs that had been lost by that current generation and were made popular again.
The way laws work now, that's not really something people can do any more without being sued or paying licensing fees. I don't see a lot of Beatles songs being sampled, because it costs a lot, so a lot of young people who might have heard some of their music won't really get the chance.
I know me personally, i've only discovered a lot of older music after hearing a cover or a sample in a song that's made me go back and look for the original.
Look at reggae music to see the difference. Songs from the 50's and 60's are still being remade, covered, remixed and used in modern songs. A lot of reggae fans still know the big names from that time because you still hear their songs.
They block any video with a sample of their song on YT even if they would have made money from it
So, tough. Back to being unknown then
There's also a trend towards guitarists that play with samplers and loopers and perform live that way.
I see plenty of new guitar music on youtube in a huge variety of styles and genres.
I also frequently hear guitars, albeit hidden under layers of effects, in hip-hop and electronic music. I think guitar music is a long ways from dead.
Rock and its derivitives and the typical 4 or 5 piece drum, bass and guitar ensemble may be dead, but guitars are doing just fine and I think if anything, there's so many more avenues available for incorporating guitars into music with a lower barrier of entry than previously.
Someone can actually sound pretty decent strumming a few chords, looping them and playing with the sound without needing to learn as much.
It's not the same, but guitars are everywhere and these days they're even being incorporated with midi technology or other things to let you do some crazy stuff with them.
Also, trends come and go at some point you'll get a group of young people who wanna rebel against the 'digital electronic sounds' the older people like and suddenly discover acoustic instruments and stuff again, they'll be new and cool, the even older people will shake their fists and say things like
'those darned kids, we used to play real instruments before any of that electronic stuff came along'
and the cycle will continue.
Now, a computer is much cheaper than a guitar, and a microphone is cheaper than a computer. American dominance and dynamism are sliding into a morass of nostalgia and rent seeking. With computers, anything can record well. You can make an album out of the sounds sampled from a pig being slaughtered, and people do.
> I don't see a lot of Beatles songs being sampled, because it costs a lot
These are two different things, from a legal and licensing standpoint. My understanding is that sampling (expensive, no set pricing) and covering (set pricing) are distinct. I think that if you cover a song, you agree to credit the original person as writer and pay them an (industry standard) fraction of the royalties. But sampling requires negotiation for usage rights and can get expensive quite quickly. I suspect people are not sampling the Beatles because it would be expensive, but that's a distinct question from that of whether people are covering the Beatles.
I was curious, and it seems Beatles songs are pretty widely covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cover_versions_of_Beat...
IIRC, personal, non-commercial "public performances" of recordings as mere ringtones are exempt from public performance royalties under US law, so there appear to be no material additional rights granted by a ringtone sale vs. an ordinary digital download.
So I guess what the extra 14.9¢ buys you is the right to automatically insert the recording into the purchaser's mobile phone's "ringtone" list?
Curious.
“We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.”
—Decca Recording Company executive, turning down the Beatles, 1962
Meanwhile, rock has stopped being "edgy" for 20+ years, and has stopped topping the charts and streams for equally long.
The set they later played to George Martin was much more like the classic Beatles
I'm not surprised you mentioned Elvis, but his catalog isn't as deep, the songwriting wasn't as good, and between his stint in Vegas, death, the impersonators, and rumors that he's not really dead, he seems like more of a punchline.
I do wonder how this will play out with the Beatles, though.
Funny enough, I think part of what will keep songs going is their inclusion in movies and TV shows, something artists are often reluctant to do.
Disney is making movies out of public domain stories because it's easier without the licensing overhead. Same is true for songs. Elvis and the Beatles fade because their songs cannot be shared without learning about the licensing agreements. A fate that Dylan could have avoided.
The Beatles followed the Disney/Nintendo school of copyright management, where you just hold onto something valuable for the fear that actually making money off the thing you own will make it worth less in the future. This is what gives you shit like the "Disney Vault" where you periodically take old works off the market entirely for the sake of artificial scarcity. In this particular case, The Beatles were a massive hole in pretty much every digital music store's back catalog, so much so that them finally selling digital copies of their songs was considered actual tech news.
Whether or not a work actually thrives once it's been escheated to the public domain is really complicated. You see, the act of reusing something in the public domain also grants you copyright over anything you added to the work. Disney's reuse of public domain stories not only saved them money, but it also took things out of the public domain, in a sense. Yes, all of the old Hans Christen Andersen stories are very much open to reuse, but only if you're careful not to use the bits Disney added into their adaptations - and there are a lot of them. So if your goal is to just keep the work accessible and relevant, something akin to a Creative Commons ShareAlike license might be more appropriate than a public domain dedication.
I don't know, sitting on one's catalog until digital music storefronts are widely established and you've been holding out long enough that the eventual release is a newsworthy event seems like a perfectly reasonable marketing decision if you ask me, typical back-catalog revenue numbers being what they are.
In the United States, authors cannot put creative works in the public domain. The concept of abandoning copyright doesn't exist in US law. At best, copyright holders can license their works permissively.
Be aware that authors (except work-for-hires) and their heirs have an inalienable statutory right of termination, which allows them to terminate copyright transfers and licenses in certain circumstances.
10 years ago my wife and I went to a cafe after Ringo’s concert. We met there her university classmate with boyfriend, excitedly we told them “We are coming from the Ringo’s concert! Did you go?”, they asked “Who is Ringo?” One of the life-forming experiences for me.
People who bought them for 300M don't think it will "drastically change" to devalue it any time soon...
I really enjoy listening to Bob Dylan now and again.
However, I've always found the Beatles to be extremely overrated.
I guess it's all subjective.
Also, your description excludes much of Dylan's extensive[1] catalog, starting with Bringing it All Back Home and including some of his best work like Nashville Skyline and Blood on the Tracks, much of which features diverse instrumentation and extensive, if not always "lush", production work.
[1] "Bob Dylan has released 39 studio albums, 94 singles, 26 notable extended plays, 50 music videos, 12 live albums, 15 volumes comprising The Bootleg Series, 20 compilation albums, 15 box sets, seven soundtracks as main contributor, five music home videos and two non-music home videos."
So, if you listen to recent artists first and then go back and listen to Beatles, they sound more of the same, even though in their time they were kilometers ahead of everyone else.
I guess to me they just sound very "oldies", which great, I'm just not really into that sort of poppy stuff.
Now, pop rock might be the most popular genre in existence across the world. So doesn't sound that great.
I think it's similar to how back in the day, and Apple ][ or Commodore was revolutionary. That doesn't mean they have remained the pinnacle in their field. But it also doesn't take away from the significance of what they accomplished in their time.
But still, I just really don't care for pop rock whether new or old.