
Photo: Angel DiBilio / Shutterstock.com
The past couple of days have been simply breathtaking watching the new Beatles documentary Get Back. As we wrote in our live review as we were watching the show for the first time, we couldn’t believe what we were watching. It was done so well and filmed in such high definition that it almost felt like we were watching actors playing the Beatles. Our lives are so full of reality shows anyways, so why would this one be any different. Yet it was, because it was the real deal. It was the Beatles in all their magical glory like we had never seen them before. A film so utterly breathtaking in how close it brought us to these four young man who practically changed the world with their music and all the cultural changes that took place because of it. The Beatles documentary Get Back brings us into the creative process and shows the Beatles as human beings who struggle with the songs and the arrangements at times and of course themselves.
Many of us who write for the site and we’re assuming many of those who read the articles grew up with The Beatles. We saw in real time how inspiring The Beatles were to other musicians and their fans. Think about how many artists were inspired by the Beatles in the 1960s. Of course they were those who tried to copy everything they did for commercial purposes, but think about all the genuine artists who were truly inspired by their music. Young kids and teenagers who were so inspired by The Beatles they became musicians and songwriters themselves. Artists like Billy Joel, Elton John, and just about everyone else who came after the Beatles were inspired by the group. How could they not be. Their music, just simply their music, so inspired the rock ‘n’ roll and pop music world for decades.
So what happened? Hip-hop and rap music is what happened. Now there’s nothing wrong with hip-hop or rap music. Every generation has their own music that inspires and defines them. Yet the Beatles music clearly inspired musical artists in the 60s, 760s and 80s. It continued into the 90s but one would not be wrong to say that the power of hip hop and rap began to push it to the side. Capitol Records attempted to keep the group in the forefront of pop culture by releasing the Anthology series and the continuing trend of remastering the albums over and over again. The Beatles were still huge, but not on the charts and not really on the ipods and soon to be phones of young teens of the 21st century.
If you look around in the pop music world, so many of the professional songwriters went country over the past twenty years. Artists like Billy Joel stopped releasing albums in the early 1990s and we have lost some of the truly magnificent artist who kept true song writing alive like Dan Fogelberg, David Bowie, Lou Reed and so many more. This generation of young artists who like to write pops songs as opposed to hip hop and rap have turned to songwriters like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran. Once again, there is nothing wrong with those artists who have sold millions of downloads, but when comparing them to the Beatles, the youth of today have a very different set of musical artist that they are looking to be inspired by as opposed to the young artists of the 60s, 70s and 80s had with the Beatles.
The presentation of this amazing Beatles documentary on Disney+ must be noted for the audience that the streaming channel serves. According to the Nielsen ratings the Disney+ audience is made up of a large percent of young people. Forty five percent of the Disney+ audience is under the age of eighteen. That’s an astonishing fact. It gets even more interesting. Twenty three percent of the Disney+ audience falls between the ages of eighteen through thirty four while another twenty three percent falls between the ages of thirty five to fifty foru. That leaves only nine percent of the audience watching Disney+ that is over the age of fifty five. That’s less than ten percent of the people that watch Disney+ were born before 1966. When compared to other streaming services like Hulu, Prime and Netflix, Disney+ has by far the youngest streaming audience of them all.
Two questions come from that data. Setting aside the financial deal to place the documentary on Disney+ the question arises was the Beatles documentary Get Back put on Disney+ to attract a younger audience to the music of The Beatles or was it placed on the channel to lure an older audience to the streaming service Disney+? The answer is probably both. Yet, the long term effects will be far different. We can only assume that the older 55+ audience will subscribe to the channel with a free offer just to watch the Beatles special, be blown away by it and then just drop the service. However it’s the under 18 audiens that knows very little about The Beatles where we may see some very long term effects.
Like we said earlier, young people are inspired usually by the current artists they grow up with. However, as we have seen they are also glued to streaming services like Disney+. The same type of young creative person who is inspired by the work of an Ed Sheeran or has watched High School Musical a hundred times because they love the songs is undoubtedly going to be curious about The Beatles special because Disney + is promoting it like crazy.
Think about all the parents or more so grandparents who are going to asks their kids and grandkids to hang out with them and watch Get Back. It’s going to happen. We all love to try and turn our kids onto our music. It usually ends in futility, but this one may be different because it’s on Disney+ and Get Back is so immediately captivating that they may not want to run away as fast as they can. They may actually sit down and watch it.
If they have an artist’s heart, if there is something inside of them that wishes to be creative just like a Billy Joel or a Elton John, there is no way the Beatles doc does not have a strong effect on them. Watching Paul McCartney sing “Let It Be,” or Lennon and McCartney singing harmonies against each other will be far more stimulating than they anything else that has so far inspired them on Disney+. The Beatles inspired generations of musicians. Hopefully they will do it again because it’s been too long since we have had anything really special happen in the music world. It’s good to have them back at the forefront of pop culture at least for a moment. Hopefully they will be embraced by today’s youth like they were….yesterday’s
Stats Source:
The DisInsider. August 22, 2021
Beatles Get Back Documentary Will Inspire A New Wave of Artists article published on Classic RockHistory.com© 2021
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