page_title: Cultural impact of the Beatles
section_title: 21st century relevance
hierarchical_section_title: Cultural impact of the Beatles / Continued interest and influence / 21st century relevance
caption_attribution_description: English: Cassini imaging team with Carolyn Porco in front, all dressed in costume, re-staging the famous Abbey Road photograph. June 2001. The Pauls are even barefoot and carrying cigarettes.
context_page_description: The English rock band the Beatles are commonly regarded as the foremost and most influential band in popular music history. With a line-up comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, they sparked the "Beatlemania" phenomenon in 1963, gained international superstardom in 1964, and remained active until their break-up in 1970. Over the latter half of the decade, they were often viewed as orchestrators of society's developments. Their recognition concerns their effect on the era's youth and counterculture, British identity, popular music's evolution into an art form, and their unprecedented following.
  Many cultural movements of the 1960s were assisted or inspired by the Beatles. In Britain, their rise to national prominence signalled the youth-driven changes in postwar society, with respect to social mobility, teenagers' commercial influence, and informality. They spearheaded the shift from American artists' global dominance of rock and roll to British acts and inspired many young people to pursue music careers. From 1964 to 1970, the group had the top-selling US single one out of every six weeks, and the top-selling US album one out of every three weeks.
context_section_description: The Beatles continue to be viewed as representing the ideals of the 1960s. In Inglis's description, "their voices and faces were the most recognized symbols of the 'swinging sixties' and they became – and remain – the iconic images of the decade." In 2009, Global Beatles Day was founded as an international celebration of the band's music and social message. The event takes place on 25 June each year in memory of the Our World performance of "All You Need Is Love".
  In the 2000s, Presley was the only other defunct musical act to generate as much continued news and interest as the Beatles. His mass appeal curtailed significantly by the end of the 2010s, while the Beatles' popularity has endured with younger generations. The amount of Google searches for "Beatles" spiked by 48.59% in 2019, relative to the previous four years. That same year, the Beatles' music was streamed on Spotify 1.7 billion times; 30% of listeners were between the ages of 18 and 24, followed by 25- to 29-year-olds, at 17%. In other words, almost half of listeners were aged under 30.
  Writing in The New York Times Magazine in 2016, cultural commentator Chuck Klosterman said that the group were "only slightly less popular now" than they were in the 1960s. He wrote that the group were "arguably" responsible for everything related to rock music, "including the very notion of a band's breaking up", and noted that no other rock group had faced unrelated assassination attempts against half its members. Klosterman concluded that, "In any reasonable world, the Beatles are the answer to the question "Who will be the Sousa of rock?"
  As of June 2019, "Yesterday" remained one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music, with over 2,200 versions. According to figures published by Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), the song was played over 7 million times on American radio during the 20th century. In 2004, the band were the most-represented act in Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, with seven out of 23 Beatles songs making the top 30.
caption: Fans recreating the cover of Abbey Road, one of the most famous and imitated album covers in history[619]
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