From The Beatles to One Direction
*Originally submitted December 15th, 2017 for the History of Music and Broadcasting in the U.S. course at the University of Virginia
The phenomenon of fandom is not new; it did not start with One Direction, and it likely existed far before Beatlemania. However, The Beatles and One Direction are consistently used as the two biggest examples of music fan culture and pandemonium. On the surface, these crazes may just seem like manic teenage girls, but upon further investigation, subtle changes in fan culture reveals a lot about how the music industry has changed since the sixties. In comparing the respective success of the Beatles and One Direction, it is clear how television, social media, and music streaming have contributed to changes in both fandom and the music industry at large, and even how these artists treat their fans.
There has been extensive research done on fandom for decades, and one point is widely agreed upon: teenage girls have far more influence than anyone would like to believe. Many areas of media and culture have fandoms, such as sports teams, television shows, and books. And many bands and artists, such as Metallica and The Grateful Dead, have influential fandoms that have virtually nothing to do with teenage girls. But artists like the Beatles and One Direction, who have traditionally been considered boybands, are reliant on teenage girls. However, there is an unfortunate stigma attached to these fans, as one Pitchfork contributor explains; “There is no greater cultural crime a young girl can commit than loving pop music without apology. Forever marginalized as the screaming, crying Beatlemaniac [or] Directioner,” (Lancaster). For these “screaming, crying” teenage girls, fandom is a way to build a community where they can share ideas and experiences (Gaffney). Beyond that, though, is a group of people that can majorly influence the success of a band or artist. And as media, technology, and the music industry have changed, so have certain aspects of fandom.
Both the Beatles’ and One Direction’s early television experiences shaped their fandoms in divergent ways. The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show has always been considered a pivotal moment in their career. It was actually a combination of radio and television that made this performance so anticipated. In the weeks leading up to the performance, their record “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was leaked before its official US release date, and American DJs began to play the song on radio, despite the efforts of Capitol Records to stop it. The record ultimately was released on December 26th, 1963, before the planned release date. “By January 10th, 1964 it had sold over one million units and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was the number one song on the Billboard charts by month’s end. In the weeks leading up to the Beatles’ performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Beatlemania went viral. Radio stations played the band’s music nearly non-stop,” (edsullivan.com). The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9th, 1964. Because of the visual nature of television, fans could see the behavior of others at Beatles concerts and performances, and then imitate this behavior in their own lives. As one writer for The Guardian observed, “For American fans, the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964…was an advertisement for Beatlemania as much as for the band,” (Lynskey). This first performance was broadcast to an audience of 73 million people, which landed a massive 43.5% rating. The Ed Sullivan website reports that “in terms of percentage of America’s population, the first two [Beatles] shows remain the highest viewed regularly scheduled television programs of all time.” This well-timed combination of radio and television exposure introduced American fans to the Beatles, and then gave them a visual for how their fans were supposed to act from then on.
Television played a crucial role in One Direction’s rise to fame, but in an incredibly different way. It is no secret that the band was put together by Simon Cowell on the British television show The X Factor, an American Idol-style singing competition. The band competed during the seventh season of the show in 2010, and were eliminated during the final, ultimately coming in third. BBC News reported that the season finale was the “most watched show of 2010” and was viewed by 17.7 million people. And although One Direction came in third, it was the construction of the show that caused fans to become so invested in the band. Charles Fairchild points out that shows like American Idol and The X Factor “were integrated into a range of online social media forms long before the idea was fashionable not as ancillary add-ons but as central forums for fan engagement that included voting for contestants,” (Fairchild, 466). One Direction did not have to come in first to be successful, because The X Factor’s model ensures that fans are devoted. By encouraging viewers to come back each week and vote on the fate of their favorite contestants, fans are given a sense of responsibility for the future success of these artists. And it should be argued that fans become even more vehement once their favorite act is voted off of the show, because now it is really up to the fans to ensure the act becomes successful. The winner is guaranteed a record deal; those who come in third place need the fans to show record labels that they can become fruitful.
While television helped One Direction gain fame and a fan base in the United Kingdom, it is social media and new technology that helped bring them to America. While on The X Factor, the band filmed a new “video diary” posted to YouTube each week that consisted of the five band members bantering with each other, answering fan questions, and encouraging the fans to keep voting. Only those in the United Kingdom could watch The X Factor each week, but anyone could watch these video diaries and be exposed to One Direction. Another major role in their rise to fame was Twitter. British fans would tweet each week telling others to vote for One Direction, and once the band was eliminated from the show, Twitter was used as the main promotional tool to continue the band’s success. Fans would create trending topics on Twitter that would catch the attention of American users, and eventually the phenomenon spread. As one writer for The Independent wrote, “When the five boys were ejected from the X Factor, the first fans took to social media to show an appetite for the band, which secured their deal with Sony,” (Leskiewicz).
Still today, Twitter continues to be the number one way for fans to communicate with both the band and each other. The verified One Direction account has 31.8 million followers, and each of the band members has between 30 and 37 million followers, with the exception of Zayn Malik, who left the band in 2015 and has 25.7 million followers. Besides the official band members’ accounts, countless One Direction fan accounts have tens of thousands of followers themselves. So while the Beatles had an enormous fanbase, the only real way to measure this was with record sales and visually at concerts, or fans showing up at television appearances and recording studios. The internet did not exist to provide a real sense of just how many people were out there supporting the band from afar. Now, Twitter has allowed fans to build a real network online where they can follow and interact with other fans from around the world. At any moment, anyone can pull up their Twitter feed and see and respond to a constant feed about the band. Because social media is not really about the music; it is about gaining insight into the lives of these artists and wanting to feel a more personal connection to them (Lancaster). And this seemingly personal connection only serves to increase the fans’ feelings that they must both defend and promote the band.
In terms of promotion, fans on Twitter may be as powerful, if not more, than the band’s hired and paid promoters and managers. Fans and management have often disagreed about what is “best” for the artist, and fans will often take to Twitter to launch their own campaigns. The biggest example of this is Project: No Control in which three fans decided to self-release the song “No Control” from One Direction’s fourth album as a single. The fans believed that the officially released singles were just formulaic boyband songs, and that “No Control” would better exemplify the band’s growth as artists. So without any help from the band members or One Direction’s management, the fans spread the word about this project on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. On the chosen day, a Thunderclap was sent out, which sends out the same tweet, Facebook status, and Tumblr post across all participating accounts at the same time. This reached over 55 million people (Buenneke). In May 2015, “No Control” became number 1 on the Billboard charts. Not only that, it was streamed over 1 million times, and was played 61 times on 41 monitored top 40 radio stations that week. The previous week, it had zero spins. Additionally, sales rose 1,674% to 5,000 downloads (Anderson). This campaign relied on social media, streaming, and digital record sales; all new platforms that were not available to Beatles fans. Beatles fans were proactive in ways that they could be by buying new albums, writing fan mail, and requesting songs at radio stations, but these new platforms allow fans to play a much more active role in their fan experience. The fans wanted “No Control” to be a single, so they made it happen.
As seen in Project No Control, streaming plays a huge role in the success of artists today. For the Beatles, success was equated with the number of physical records sold. And using this, the Beatles were obviously incredibly successful, with 1.6 billion singles sold in the US, 177 million albums sold in the US, and 600 million albums sold worldwide (CBS News). Now, there are a seemingly infinite number of ways to define a band’s success. In comparison to the Beatles’ 177 million US album sales, One Direction has a mere 7.6 million. Of course this is only across 5 albums, but it demonstrates how lower sales numbers are becoming more impressive. In November 2014, One Direction became one of the fourteen artists that have hit one billion total streams on Spotify. A calculation by Spotify found that “all of One Direction’s streams to date would add up to more than 5,000 continuous years of playtime,” and this was before they had released their fifth and final album (Davidson). When the band dropped their first single without Zayn Malik, “Drag Me Down”, it broke streaming records. The BBC reported that the track earned “the highest first-week streams for a single in the UK with 2.03m plays,” (BBC). One thing to note about streams is that one person can stream a song multiple times and this is recorded. Not to discredit these record-breaking numbers, but one album sale counts as one album sale. No matter how many times someone listens to the album, it is still one album sale. If a listener is using a subscription-based streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music, they are not technically paying anything for that one song or that one album, and they can play it as many times as they want. Knowing this, fans will create campaigns on social media to stream a new single endlessly so as to ensure that it achieves these impressive numbers or ends up in Spotify’s top charts. There is no doubt that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or “Hey Jude” have been listened to well over one billion times, but there is no way to track this when only relying on physical record sales.
The Beatles at Shea Stadium on August 15th, 1965
But perhaps the biggest change in the music industry between the Beatles and One Direction is not the shift from record sales to digital and streaming, but the broader shift from selling music to selling experiences. The Beatles played their most iconic live performance at Shea Stadium in 1965 to a crowd of 56,000 people, when concert tickets sold for around $5 (Fleming). According to their promoter, that concert grossed $304,000, which was considered “the greatest gross in the history of show business (at the time),” (Carr & Tyler, 49). And while this may have been considered a lot at the time, and a dollar in 1965 would certainly be worth more now, these numbers are nowhere near One Direction’s gross tour earnings. In 2014, the band’s Where We Are tour came in at the world’s number one tour of the year, servicing 3.4 million attendees and grossing over $290 million (Caulfield, Lipshutz). This averages out to about $4.2 million per concert across 69 shows. This tour featured a 235,000-person audience at Croke Park in Dublin, and three sold out nights at Wembley Stadium in London. That this feat was achieved by a band of twenty-year-old boys sounds astounding, but it only demonstrates yet another change in the music industry. Because people now stream their music from subscription-based services, it has become increasingly harder to profit from both album and single sales. In exchange, artists, record labels and management companies are profiting off of experiences like concerts and other exclusive events and merchandise.
One Direction at San Siro Stadium on July 28th, 2014
Streaming services are the less costly alternative to paying the full price for each album and single one wants to buy, but there has yet to be a replacement for the experience of hearing live music. There was excitement in going to the store, buying the new Beatles record, and listening to it for the first time. There is still excitement in hearing a new One Direction song or album for the first time, but it can be done at exactly midnight on the release date without having to pay upfront. Listening to a new album with friends was a social activity; listening is much more private and individualized now, so concerts are the real space for fans to come together and experience music listening. Artists and their labels have found further ways to capitalize off of concert experiences by filming them and releasing them in theaters and on DVD. This allows fans to experience the concert again and again, or for the first time if they were unable to attend in person. Morgan Spurlock’s One Direction concert film, One Direction: This Is Us, grossed $28 million at the North American box office, becoming the fourth-highest grossing concert film ever (Caulfield & Lipshutz).
All of these factors–television, social media, and streaming–have contributed to apparent differences in fan experiences and fandom since the sixties. But in the grand scheme of things, fans are still doing what they have always done; supporting their favorite artist using whatever tools are available to them. The advent of social media and streaming may have just increased the visibility of these fans. It is important to also consider how the perspective of the artist has changed. In 1966, the Beatles famously stopped touring because the screaming eventually got so loud that they could barely hear their own music. They appreciated the excitement from the fans at first, but ultimately found the pandemonium overwhelming and exhausting and wanted no part in it anymore (Stolworthy). There have also been countless fan reports of excited fans approaching Ringo or Paul, only to be dismissed because said Beatle did not want to be disturbed (Lynskey). If a Beatle was rude to a teenage girl because he wanted some well-deserved privacy, it would likely not be broadcast to tens of thousands of other fans on Twitter. Without social media, there was a much more detached relationship between idol and worshipper.
One Direction does not have this luxury. From the start, the band was able to see the power their fans had over their career during The X Factor. On Twitter, the individual band members can “follow” fans or message them directly, creating a sense of a deeper relationship. If the band does something positive, their Twitter feeds will be filled with thousands of positive messages and praise. If they do something bad, the fans are not afraid to let them know that they messed up. One Direction has always been known to praise and thank their fans for their support and acknowledge how much the fans do for the band–a trend that has continued into their successful solo careers. Maybe this is purely genuine. Or, as one Pitchfork author suggests, maybe “the band’s appreciation is as much about gratitude as it is self-protection,” (Lancaster). Social media serves as a constant reminder of how much influence the fans have in the band’s accomplishments, and frequently praising them and thanking them lets them know that they are doing a good job. Even two years after the band officially announced a “hiatus”, each solo member continues to stress the impact that One Direction fans have had on their careers. Unlike Ringo Starr, Harry Styles cannot rudely dismiss a fan in the name of privacy, because there is always the possibility that it will be broadcast to thousands of other fans and cause a crack in the foundation.
Ultimately, although the tools available to them have changed, Beatles and One Direction fans have had countless identical experiences. The excitement of seeing the band on television, and the euphoric feeling of listening to an album for the first time. Supporting the band at the height of their success. Living through the loss of a band member, whether it was the physical loss of John Lennon when he was shot or the symbolic loss of Zayn Malik when he left the band. Supporting the band wholeheartedly for a whirlwind six years, and then going on to accept each band member as a solo artist. Emotionally, fan experiences have been, and most likely always will be, the same. What have changed are the media, technology, and music industries. And as these landscapes continue to change, so will the structure of fandom and the possibilities available to them. They may never be perfectly understood, but if one thing is for certain, it is this: never underestimate the power of teenage girls.
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