They set a standard which was followed/copied for decades - self-contained music group writing/performing their own material. And they were really good at it.
The one thing that didn't get copied from them in most cases was multiple singers. They didn't really have a 'front man'. They had a lot of harmony singing. These are keys missing from most of the bands that copied them over the years.
The voices worked well together, but were distinct enough, and the songs were distinct enough, that one could enjoy 'George' Beatles music without caring much for 'Paul' Beatles music (for example).
If you don't like Bono's voice, you're going to struggle with liking U2. If you don't like Stipe's voice, you'll have a hard time being an REM fan. Don't like Mick Jagger's voice? Tough luck on digging the Stones too much.
There was also enough variety to allow almost everyone to be able to find some Beatles track they love (or at least like).
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.
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...
George Martin was a great composer in his own right, and Geoff Emerick/Alan Parsons could bend the antiquated technology to their will. Then you have Paul who is a really good producer and John who is a great abstract thinker. So there is no single voice coming from a Beatles record.
Compared to today, where everyone switches producers every album (or on the same album), staying mostly in the same place with the same group of support people for... 7 years is relatively remarkable, and, I suspect allowed them all to grow together in various ways.
The 20th century has seen 3 true revolutions in music technology that have changed the nature of music itself (photography went through similar paradigm shifts)
1. Recorded music (straight to wax then vynil records) was the first one (before that there were only live performances) : it made music ubiquitous, created a new industry and business model.
2. Multitrack recording to tape was the second, as you could now edit, tweak, refine after recording. Skilled instrumentists still mattered, but less so. A crucial new artistic role was invented : music producer.
3. Digital music production is the 3rd and largest one : for the first time in history, music is not limited by a human's ability to play an instrument, or even by the law of physics governing the sounds a physical instrument is able to make.
Anything an algorithm or AI can output as series of 16/24bit values going through a digital/analog converter around 44100 times per second and ending up in speakers : that can now be music, or at least an instrument.
Electronic musicians can still record and assemble familiar sounds from physical (acoustic or electronic) instruments if they choose to, but they can now also be their own luthiers and introduce one or 100 of their own never-heard-before instruments in a single song.
They can still play music live, they can do so through new human-machine interfaces driving software, they can assemble sounds in a UI, or through code, and they can code the sounds themselves, or do a combination of all that.
There is now absolute freedom to produce anything the ear can hear, only limited by one's imagination and ability to procure (or code) software instruments and effects. Of course, this has had a massive impact on the art of music itself, much like CGI has enabled telling stories in movies that could never be told before.
Virtually all "interesting" new music being released (i.e. not country music, not rock :) ) takes advantage of this new normal.
Yes, digital music exists, but you haven't convinced me why I should listen to it. I'm sure some of it is awesome, and most of it is junk, just like all music has been through the ages. The difference is that with old music, I can rely on the "test of time" to weed out the junk.
One can spend one's whole life exploring music which has stood the test of time and is pretty much guaranteed to be awesome. By sticking to critically-acclaimed classics, one pretty much eliminates all risk of hearing junk music. One also loses the opportunity to hear new great music in its infancy, but so what?
The classics also have "canonicity". By exposing myself to them, I better understand references to them in novels; I recognize them in movies; I have something to talk about at dinner parties; etc. None of this applies to some bandcamp page with ~1000 all-time listeners, no matter how good the technology.
You talk about this new music being so great, but is it qualitatively anywhere near as good as the classics? Again, as I said in my first comment, can you post some examples? If some new band is conquering the world because they've discovered the long-hidden Fundamental Theorem of Music, then I want to know about it!!! (But I doubt it, because if anyone had done so, it would usher in a new "mania" like Beatlemania, and I would have heard about it already.)
As new ideas emerge they often are raw and intense. As they get adopted by commercial music producers, these ideas become tamed and soft. Would you like to hear an original idea or a version adapted for average taste? Thats what you are constantly missing out on.
I guess your main problem is you think you can qualitatively compare art. Nope, stop dreaming that some theorem or critic will prove that music is good. Its all subjective, don't be afraid to explore your own taste.
As long as you keep listening to curated top 1000 lists, it shows that you have personally no actual opinion on the matter.
Can you post an example of some of this "raw and intense" music? I'm asking sincerely, and I'm baffled why so many people in this subthread seem so resistant to post even one single example. Are you guarding your musical finds close, like they'll run out if someone else listens to them?
At least according to the Bach and Beatles enthusiasts and people that game music to be a competition for money rather than a form of expression or storytelling.
If it has got to the point where 'bands' are manufactured because the music industry can kind of 'read' what the audience will buy, rather than what the audience needs, what actually _is_ 'pop music'?
Then again, to offset that, we have glitch music.
Things started to get really weird once we could apply room shapes to music and then play them in another room thanks to the wonders of modern technology.
And then I actually gave the classics a try.
Not all types of technology obsolete themselves like computer technology. The Beatles have yet to be beaten in pop music, and Bach has yet to be beaten in music in general.
But just in case I've got a blindspot, please post a few links to some of these tracks that use cutting-edge music production to produce such novel sounds (I assume you're talking about something besides autotune). I'd like to give them a listen.