Spotify’s subscriber numbers are leaving Apple Music in the dust
Although it's facing some stiff competition, it looks like Spotify has found a way to keep its paying user base growing.
A little over a year ago, back in June 2015, the world's most popular music streaming service counted 20 million paying subscribers. That number grew to 30 million by March this year. Earlier today, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that more than 40 million users are paying for Spotify services.
Looking at the growth, it's impressive to see Spotify doubling its paying subscribers in 15 months and gaining 33% more subscribers in less than six months.
To put things into perspective, Apple Music now counts 17 million paying subscribers. If we're to compare Spotify's numbers with those of Apple Music, Spotify is doing really well. Sure, Apple Music only launched back in January, but following a massive initial wave of users, Apple's streaming service was actually slower in growing its paid user base. Back in April, Apple Music counted 13 million subscribers, meaning that it only added 4 million paying users since then.
Back when Apple Music launched, many industry watchers were quick to anticipate that Spotify will have a tough time maintaining its lead in the music streaming service niche. Nine months later, however, the numbers show that despite the iPhone maker's insane marketing budget, brand recognition, and iTunes popularity, Apple Music isn't winning hearts as fast as Spotify.
Jay Z-owned Tidal announced back in June that it counts 4.2 million subscribers. Some previous rumors claimed that Apple will eventually buy Tidal and integrate the service into Apple Music, but those rumors have been recently denied by an Apple executive.
Anyone who listens to commercial radio nowadays has probably been hit with the impression that a lot of pop music sounds very similar. It’s easy to dismiss this complaint as a gripe of the old and the cynical, but science actually bears this out: pop music has indeed been pretty homogenous throughout its history and is becoming ever more so.
In one 2014 study, researchers in the US and Austria analysed more than 500,000 albums, across 15 genres and 374 sub-genres. The complexity of each genre of music over time was compared to its sales. And almost always, as genres increase in popularity, they also become more generic.
In itself, this does not mean much – since genres and subgenres are always emerging. It may be considered a truism that a genre becomes accepted once its rules are defined – and once the genre is established, deviation will result in a new genre or sub-genre. For instance, funk emerged as a new genre out of soul and RnB, with a far stronger emphasis on rhythmic groove and the bass.
Another study, in 2012, measured the evolution of Western popular music, using a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which contains vast amounts of low-level data about the audio and music content in each song. They found that between 1955 and 2010, songs had become louder and less varied in terms of their musical structure.
These are trends – but the perception among many listeners is that this homogenisation of music has taken a big leap forward in recent years. And there are a couple of important technological developments that have made this happen.
The loudness war
Dynamic range compression is the (usually automated) continual adjustment of the levels of an audio signal, primarily intended to reduce the variations in loudness. Its overuse has led to a “loudness war”. The musician who wants a loud recording, the record producer who wants a wall of sound, the engineers dealing with changing loudness levels during recording, the mastering engineers who prepare content for broadcast and the broadcasters competing for listeners have all acted as soldiers in this loudness war.
But the loudness war may have already peaked. Audiologists have become concerned that the prolonged loudness of new albums might cause hearing damage and musicians have highlighted the sound quality issue. An annual Dynamic Range Day has been organised to raise awareness, and the non-profit organisation Turn Me Up! was created to promote recordings with more dynamic range. Standards organisations have provided recommendations for how loudness and loudness range can be measured in broadcast content, as well as recommending appropriate ranges for both. Together, these developments have gone a long way towards establishing a truce in the loudness war.
Auto-Tune
But there’s another technology trend that shows no signs of slowing down. Auto-Tune, which a surprising number of today’s record producers use to correct the pitch of their singers, actually originated as a byproduct of the mining industry.
From 1976 through to 1989, Andy Hildebrand worked for the oil industry, interpreting seismic data. By sending sound waves into the ground, he could detect the reflections and map potential drill sites – in effect, using sound waves to find oil underground. Hildebrand, popularly known as “Dr Andy”, studied music composition at Rice University in Houston, Texas and used his knowledge in both areas to develop audio processing tools – the most famous of which was Auto-Tune.
At a dinner party, a guest challenged him to invent a tool that would help her sing in tune. Based on the phase vocoder, which covers a range of mathematical methods to manipulate the frequency representation of signals, Hildebrand devised techniques to analyse and process audio in musically relevant ways. Hildebrand’s company, Antares Audio Technologies, released Auto-Tune in late 1996.
Auto-Tune was intended to correct or disguise off-key vocals. It moves the pitch of a note to the nearest true semitone (the nearest musical interval in traditional octave-based Western tonal music), thus allowing the vocal parts to be tuned.
The original Auto-Tune had a speed parameter which could be set between 0 and 400 milliseconds and determined how quickly the note moved to the target pitch. Engineers soon realised that this could be used as an effect to distort vocals and make it sound as if the voice leaps from note to note while staying perfectly and unnaturally in tune all the while. It also gives the voice an artificial, synthesiser-like sound, that can be appealing or irritating depending on your personal taste.
This unusual effect was the trademark sound of Cher’s December 1998 hit song, Believe, which was the first commercial recording to intentionally feature the audible side-effects of Auto-Tune.
Like many audio effects, engineers and performers found a creative use for Auto-Tune, quite different from the intended use. As Hildebrand said: “I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that.” Yet Auto-Tune and competing pitch correction technologies, such as Celemony’s Melodyne, are now widely applied (in amateur and professional recordings – and across many genres) for both intended and unusual, artistic uses.
Its became so prevalent, in fact, that these days it is expected almost universally on commercial pop music recordings. Critics say that it is a major reason why so many recordings sound the same nowadays (though the loudness wars and overproduction in general are also big factors). And some young listeners who have grown up listening to auto-tuned music think the singer lacks talent if they hear an unprocessed vocal track.
It has been lampooned in music and television and on social media, and Time magazine called it one of the “50 Worst Inventions”. But if anything, both its subtle, corrective use and overt, creative use continues to grow. So if you can’t tell your Chris Brown from your Kanye West, it may be down to Dr Andy.
How Many Streams Does It Take to Earn $1? Take a Look…
It takes 776 streams on YouTube to earn a dollar, and just 32 on Microsoft Groove. On SoundCloud, you’ll need 766 streams to earn $1, while it only takes 96 from the SoundCloud GO premium service. In between, there are streaming music services Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Rhapsody, TIDAL, Google Play, and VEVO, all paying wildly different sums for the same exact song.
Why the polar extremes? We’ve been receiving — and posting — lots of streaming payout information on Digital Music News, only to learn that payouts aren’t normalizing over time. Instead, they’re become more divergent over time. Just recently, an independent hip-hop and r&b label shared an entire statement with Digital Music News, one showing multi-dollar payouts from Microsoft Groove (via Xbox), and almost worthless payouts from YouTube (take a look).
Now, the latest streaming music data dump come from an independent rapper, who will remain unnamed but leaked his/her payout spreadsheets to industry executive Wendy Day.
Here’s the breakdown:
Service
Per Stream Royalty
# of Streams = $1
Microsoft Groove
0.031113139
32
Soundcloud GO
0.01037594
96
Slacker
0.006153846
163
Tidal
0.0054
185
Google Play
0.005278658
189
Apple Music
0.005103035
196
Deezer
0.00510566
196
Rhapsody
0.004579501
218
Spotify
0.003589881
279
Vevo
0.002071429
483
Aspiro
0.001676301
597
Soundcloud
0.001305585
766
YouTube
0.001288172
776
A few quick notes on this data. TIDAL is part of Aspiro, acquired by Jay Z last year, but we’ve noticed in statements that ‘Aspiro’ usually refers to the older service, and ‘Tidal’ the newer service, with payment lags to blame. Tidal has received lots of complaints over delayed payments, but the actual payouts seem to be on the upper range of competitors when they do arrive.
Also, this doesn’t have anything from YouTube Red, which is a recently launched premium service. The scattered data we’ve gotten on YouTube Red shows higher per-stream payouts, but total subscriber levels are rumored to be extremely low. The same applies to SoundCloud Go, which is SoundCloud’s premium attempt, though interestingly, GO is now starting to appear on royalty reports.
Keep in mind that Apple Music is entirely subscription, though payouts on the three-month free trial are markedly lower. Spotify also has a free and paid tier, with the paid tier paying multiples over the free tier. Unfortunately, those tiers weren’t broken out in this royalty statement.
How Mark Korven Avoided the Temptations of Temp Music to Score 'The Witch'
The first rule of composing: don't sacrifice your own creativity in an attempt to emulate the work of others.
Robert Eggers' The Witch has been the runaway success story of the year so far and an ideal model for low-budget filmmakers everywhere. It's brought in over $40 million in box office sales around the world, a staggering sum for any independent film, even one distributed by a powerhouse tastemaker studio like A24.
The reason? Horror is as popular a genre as any out there, but Eggers' colonial twist brought a vision so complete that any serious film audience has found it impossible to ignore. An essential ingredient in gluing that vision together was Mark Korven's haunting acoustic score. It features the vibrations of instruments we've never heard before, which have been orchestrated to feel "like a 99-minute nightmare that sits on your chest like a sack of lead."
No Film School got a chance to hear about Korven and Eggers' collaboration as well as check out a few of the composer's unique instruments at TIFF 2016earlier this week during a special masterclass held at the industry conference. Here are a few of the highlights from the conversation with Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes, in which Korven stresses the importance of steering your director away from temporary music, and more.
Keep an ear to the ground
"Like a lot of kids, I started out playing in basement bands," Korven explained when asked how he got his start. "I used to break dishes on the second floor in my mom’s kitchen because we were playing Black Sabbath in the basement."
Korven had his first film fall into his lap accidentally. After not quite cutting it as a performer, "as soon as I found myself in the position of responding to visuals, I thought, 'This is where I should be. This is where I fit.'"
Don't let the director get attached to temp music
When Korven was first starting out, he remembered "there was no such thing as temp music back then, or there was very little of it, so you were forced to use your imagination. You watched the visuals and whatever started coming into your mind, the score would come out of that."
Things are quite different now. He explained: "As is so typical for composers nowadays, you're reacting to the temp music, because typically the director’s fallen in love with the temp music. Editors will throw in temporary music while they’re cutting and quite often they get overly familiar with it and often they fall in love with it. So you’re in the position of trying to beat the temp music or trying to find a sound like the temp music. That's been a real problem."
"Temp music makes for lazy composers."
Taking that temp music and create something better
So how do you beat your director's obsession with temp music? "It’s really difficult," said Korven. "Sometimes it gets to the point where I hear if they’ve been cutting for months and if the temp scores been in for four or five months, I know it's pretty well useless trying to get them unwelded."
The strategy he's found successful is to "understand what they're reacting to, what part they’ve fallen in love with, and try and achieve it some other way."
"Hopefully," he stresses, "I can go beyond their temp music. So that’s what I always set out to do. How can I do better than what they’ve presented me in the beginning?"
A double-edged sword
While he warns of the dangers of using temp music, Korven also acknowledges its utility. "Temp music is really a double-edged sword to me," he said, "but most composers just hate it completely. If I’m working on a film and have no idea what to do—I’m just at a complete loss—having some interesting temp music can steer me."
This works, of course, as long as "the director can let go of it," Korven said.
Temp music makes for lazy composers
"Sometimes you get bad temp music," Korven said. "The director falls in love with it. You’re forced to toe the line and go along with bad music. That's the worst case situation. Temp music really makes for lazy composers; in a way it, makes my job easy because it takes me out of the process. I sort of just have to copy what’s there, collect my paycheck and go home."
But Korven doesn't want to phone it in. "You’re never going to do this amazing creative thing—you never allow the possibility of what the score might have been—if you do that."
The solution? Hire your composers early in the process
Korven isn't naive in his endeavors as a composer. "I understand that these days, editors and directors need temp music," he admitted. "The editor needs temp music to get his cut approved." So he provides a solution: "What I'd like to suggest to people is to hire your composer early. Get them to pull from their own library of music. Use the composer's music and go from there instead of pulling from a John Williams score or whatever. For me, that’s the lesser of two evils."
It's clear that with this sort of experimentation, Korven fit right into the sort of feel that Eggers was going for with his period horror piece. Their collaboration was almost as unique as the instruments in which Korven used to score the film, itself.
Eggers' constraints quite literally set the tone for the film
"We had a lot of guidelines or sort of rules on what we could do musically. Everything absolutely had to be acoustic, there could be no electronics of any kind. So that was a bit of a struggle. And the other thing, everything had to be very very dissonant almost all the time." It's these sort of constraints however that led the pair to find a totally distinct and fitting sound.
"Typically when I would write a score," Korven explains, "You would have moments that are very consonant. There would be release and then there would be tension. But he wanted it to be like a ninety-minute nightmare that sits on your chest like a sack of lead. The other thing he didn’t want, he didn’t want any sense of melody at all, so he didn’t want traditional melody, he didn’t want traditional harmony, he just wanted something completely out there."
Set up the score so your director can knock it down
Korven revealed that the soundtrack to The Witch was largely improvised. "I knew that I had to keep things very, very loose because Robert was very much a hands-on director," he said. "I mean, when you see a Robert Eggers film, it truly is a Robert Eggers film. He is totally the mastermind. It’s his artistic vision that I was trying to help realize. So I wanted to keep things very, very, loose, very improvised, so that he could move notes around whenever he wanted."
The majority of the collaboration took place in the movement along the timeline. "I sampled a lot of the instruments that I play so that we could place them on the timeline and Eggers could sort of move notes around all he wanted," said Korven. "I needed maximum flexibility when I was working, so it was a long process."
Korven's instruments
So, what sort of instruments did Korven use to attract Eggers' attention and give The Witch its unique sound? Take a look at the videos below. (Though they all feature the same images, the videos start at different points in the performance, showcasing different instruments.)
The Waterphone
The Waterphone was invented by Richard Waters. The creator's website describes them as "stainless steel and bronze monolithic, one-of-a-kind, acoustic, tonal-friction instruments that utilize water in the interior of their resonators to bend tones and create water echoes. In the world family of musical instruments, the Waterphone is between a Tibetan Water Drum, an African Kalimba (thumb piano) and a 16th century Peg or Nail Violin."
The "Apprehension Engine"
This one felt less like an instrument and more like an invention. Korver explained that he just received the final product the morning prior to this demonstration, and it's something that he got custom-made for the purpose of scoring horror films. The "scary sound instrument" he invented is a wooden box featuring strings, four metal rulers, an e-bow, spring reverb, a toggle switch, as well as various magnets and springs
The Nyckelharpa
The Nyckelharpa is the instrument that won Korven the job with Eggers and is featured heavily in the score to The Witch. It is a 16th-century Swedish string instrument that resembles the strange offspring of a violin, harp, and piano.
This idea starts about a year ago, when I heard that they (Fox) will make a new season for Prison Break.
Well, since then I've been waiting for Fox to release the first teaser.
As soon as the teaser came up I did a download of it. As the teaser I saw is a little long about 2 minutes, I decided to cut some scenes to get something about minute.
Mean while, I was putting several ideas on paper such as "actions songs" and "drama songs" and doing some experiments with combining instruments.
The final result you can see and heard on my youtube channel or on my teaser below. I use on total 6 soundtracks.
I hope you join the soundtracks. Any comments (Good or Bad) will be welcome, I'm always open to improve my skills. See you Soon!
In 2017, Square Enix will release a high-definition remaster of Final Fantasy XII: International for the PlayStation 4. Those playing the game can choose between two soundtracks: the original PlayStation 2 version and a re-recorded soundtrack created for the HD remaster.
For the original version of the soundtrack, composer Hitoshi Sakimoto was forced to simplify his music to accommodate the limitations of the PlayStation 2. For this version, he was able to re-record the soundtrack with high-quality instruments and in 7.1 surround sound to finally realise his original vision while taking advantage of current sound production capabilities.
The trailer above features the new versions of “Dream to be a Sky Pirate” and “The Sky Pirate”. They’re relatively conservative arrangements of the originals, but considerably improving the quality of the sound. The samples suggest the new tracks were produced through a hybrid approach, blending instrumental performances with modern samplers, as with Final Fantasy X HD.
10 things you never knew about the Beatles from a new documentary
Thanks to Rolling Stones Magazine.
It's widely believed that the Beatles didn't get truly serious until 1966. That was the year of Revolver, their first "on purpose" LP masterpiece, and the equally bold artistic misstep of the infamous "butcher" cover. Their conversation turned more potent – touching on hot button topics like religion, war, and race – and their minds expanded with the use of psychedelic drugs.
Most crucially, they abandoned live performance, transitioning from mere flesh-and-blood figures on show at local baseball stadiums to mystical artistes who dispensed vibrant works from their studio laboratory in Swinging London. This was the time of transition – pop to rock, moptops to men, black and white to color – that led to their seminal Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album the following year.
Rather than examining this career apex, Eight Days a Week, Ron Howard's long-awaited new Beatles documentary – in theaters today and streaming on Hulu starting Saturday – fills in some crucial backstory. Released just after the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' final concert, the documentary is a whirlwind celebration of their touring life. What's more, it challenges the traditional notion that the group's live career was little more than fondly remembered hysteria that ultimately led to More Important Work. "We just wanted to play," Ringo Starr says early in the film. "Playing was the most important thing."
Eight Days a Week is a respectful retelling of the Beatles' early tale, but in glorious Technicolor. Howard, whose affection for mid-20th-century history has been well documented with box-office hits like Apollo 13, Frost/Nixon and A Beautiful Mind, underwent an exhaustive search to recover long-lost footage, which was then lovingly restored to cinema quality. All assembled, the band's story takes on the drama and scale of a Biblical epic that's scarcely believable even half a century later.
"By the end, it became quite complicated, but at the beginning things were really simple," says Paul McCartney in voiceover. Simple isn't always bad. Before they became technical recording masters, the Beatles were, as McCartney often says with charming understatement, "a great little rock & roll band."
Eight Days a Week lets you experience them like never before, and feel the frenzy of those thrilling years that came and went much too fast.
1. Real-deal Beatles live footage is as awesome as you'd hope.
Technically, the earliest surviving color film of the Beatles in concert was shot in February 1962, but the silent, jerky, home-movie-quality reel does little to conjure the raw excitement of a Scouse rave-up. Instead, Eight Days a Weekopens with footage taken on November 20th, 1963, at Manchester's ABC Cinema. Filmed as part of a Pathe News short entitled "The Beatles Come to Town", the six-and-a-half minute clip captured the group performing "She Loves You" and "Twist and Shout" – and a crowd of young women hilariously overcome with ardor. It represents the first known color film to include sound of the band performing. Professionally shot, it provides a stunning opening to the documentary, as well as an electrifying glimpse of what was like to sit front row at an early Fab Four concert.
In addition, Howard also makes use of the familiar footage taken at Liverpool's Cavern Club on August 22nd, 1962. Filmed in black and white by the Manchester-based Grenada Television network, it shows the band mere days after Ringo Starr became a full-time member. In fact, he's so green that he's hasn't yet managed to train his hair into the band's signature moptop. The historic clip is most likely the first-ever film of the four together, and certainly the earliest to include audio of the band.
2. McCartney still gets misty discussing the first time Starr played with the Beatles.
The Beatles famously included Pete Best on the drum kit during the early years of their career, but when he was too sick to make one of their Cavern gigs in February 1962, they called in another local stickman: Ringo Starr. They first became friends months earlier while playing the red-light district in Hamburg, Germany, alongside Starr's band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Though their union had been primarily offstage until that point, Starr was more than happy to sit in with his new mates.
The usually reserved McCartney became noticeably teary as he remembered the first time the Fab Four joined forces. "Bang! He kicks in, and it was an 'Oh, my god' moment. We're all looking at each other going, 'Yeah. This is it.' I'm getting very emotional." Starr himself offered an equally tender observation. "I'm an only child, and I felt like I suddenly had three brothers." He would join his rock brethren for good in August 1962.
3. When the going got tough, the Beatles had a rallying cry.
Though they would ultimately look back at the time fondly, it wasn't always easy being in the pre-fame Beatles. Before the screams and the money, they had to make do with playing eight hours a night in Hamburg for what amounted to beer money, all while sleeping in a glorified broom closet. Dates in Liverpool were often derailed by onstage power outages, overflowing toilets, van crashes and the occasional punches from local gangs or jealous boyfriends in the crowd.
When spirits sagged, John Lennon took it upon himself to lighten the mood with equal parts humor and encouragement. "We used to have this saying that I would chant and they would answer when they were depressed and thinking that the group was going nowhere and this is a shitty deal and we're in a shitty dressing room," he says in an archival interview. "I'd say, 'Where are we goin', fellas?' And they'd go, 'To the top, Johnny!' And I'd say, 'Where's that, fellas?!' And they'd say, 'To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny!' And I'd say, 'Riiiiight!' And we'd all sort of cheer up." 4. They went from sleeping in one room to an entire floor of the Plaza Hotel – and then back to one room.
The Beatles' living conditions during their first Hamburg residencies could nearly be classified as human-rights violations. For months the four lived in a windowless concrete-walled storage room in the back of a small movie theater. Lacking any heat, they were provided with British flags for makeshift blankets on their bunks. After playing onstage all night, they would grab a few hours of frozen slumber before being awoken by the sound of that day's picture show.
"Hamburg was kind of messy, having to sleep all together in one room – there was no bathroom or anything," recalled George Harrison. The closest thing they had to facilities was the ladies' restroom next door, which could be heard – as well as smelled – from their beds. There they washed and shaved with water from the toilets.
When the Beatles received their heroes' welcome in New York City barely three years later in February 1964, they were put up at the ultra-luxe Plaza Hotel. The band and their entourage occupied nearly the entire 12th floor, including the 10-room presidential suite. But despite the space, the four friends retired to smaller quarters. "We had the whole floor in the Plaza, and the four of us ended up in the bathroom just to get a break from the incredible pressure," remember Starr.
5. The band made its U.S. radio debut thanks to a one teenager, the first American Beatlemaniac.
Eight Days a Week offers the chance to hear the very first time the Beatles were played over U.S. radio on December 17th, 1963, an event that was just as crucial as the band's American television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show a few months later. Amazingly, the event can be traced to the actions of one 15-year-old from Silver Springs, Maryland, named Marsha Albert. She is Patient X in the epidemic known as American Beatlemania.
Before their Sullivan appearance, the band was featured in a CBS Evening News segment broadcast December 10th, 1963. Albert was watching at home and liked what she heard. Although their latest single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," wasn't yet released in the United States, she obtained a copy from a British Airways flight attendant. Peeved that no one else had caught on to this great new sound, she wrote a letter to popular DJ Carroll James at Washington D.C.'s WWDC network reading: "Why can't we have music like that here in America?"
James appreciated Albert's passion and invited her on his show to play her copy of the record. "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in the United States, here are the Beatles singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand,'" she intoned before dropping the needle – and opening the floodgates. The station was inundated with requests for the song, forcing Capitol Records, the Beatles' American label, to rush-release the song weeks earlier than scheduled.
"There's no doubt whatsoever that the Beatles would have conquered America anyway," historian Martin Lewis told USA Today in 2004. "But the speed and magnitude of that stratospheric kick-off could not have happened without Marsha Albert. If the record had been released January 13th, as first planned, kids wouldn't have heard it 20 times a day, as they did during the school break. It would never have sold 1 million copies in three weeks. There wouldn't have been 10,000 kids at JFK to greet the Beatles. Marsha didn't start Beatlemania; she jump-started it."
6. Their first American concert had some major technical problems.
Although their Ed Sullivan performance on February 9th, 1964 was far more iconic, the Beatles' first true concert on American soil took place two days later at the Coliseum in Washington D.C. The arena was configured for a boxing match, with the band playing a 35-minute, 12-song set in an un-roped ring at the center, while 8,092 fans watched, screamed and threw jelly beans from all sides. Though the arrangement ensured maximum ticket sales, it also meant that they would only face a quarter of the crowd at any given time.
To fix this problem, they were forced to pause every third song and shift their microphones, amps and drums 90 degrees clockwise. The solution was clunky but successful – until midway through one move when Starr's drum riser got stuck. In the footage he can be seen struggling mightily until collapsing with mock exhaustion. Lennon begins frantically shouting for the band's trusty roadie, Mal Evans, "Mal! You've got to turn these drums around!" When Evans finally succeeds, Lennon claps with approval. Starr returns to his kit, which he proceeds to punish with one of his most energetic performances on film.
7. Their 1964 tour was a triumph for civil rights.
Though Eight Days a Week delves deep into the Beatles' myriad of musical accomplishments, the documentary also touches on their seldom-discussed victory for civil rights. The band's first full-scale American tour in the late summer of 1964 brought them through the Deep South and face to face with segregation for the first time. The foursome was shocked by the practice, and vehemently opposed it.
McCartney made his feelings known to DJ Larry Kane, who accompanied the group on their tour. "It's a bit silly to segregate people," he said at the time. "I just think it's stupid. You can't treat other human beings like animals. That's the way we all feel, and that's the way people in England feel, because there's never any segregation in concerts and England – and if there was we wouldn't play 'em."
They made good on their vow when the tour reached Jacksonville, Florida. Seats at the Gator Bowl were to be separated by race, but the band refused to perform until they were assured that the audience would be mixed. Rather than risk a riot of disappointed Beatle fans, the promoters acquiesced, integrating the venue and setting a precedent for all future Beatle performances to come. "We played to people," says Starr. "We didn't play to those people or that people – we just played to people."
8. The Beatles filmed "Help!" in the Bahamas to ward off the taxman.
In contrast to the stark, deliberately claustrophobic backstage ambiance of the Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, 1965's Help! was a colorful, big-budget splash that saw the band traversing the globe. Several of the foreign set pieces were incorporated into the plot to accommodate the Beatles' own traveling desires. While understandable that the sunny beaches of the Bahamas would make the Liverpool lads' wish list, the location choice was actually an attempt to thwart George Harrison's old nemesis: the tax man.
"We all had meetings about tax structure and they would say, 'Oh, you've got to put your money in the Bahamas or somewhere,'" recalled McCartney. The band's financial advisor had set up a tax shelter in what was then a British territory, requiring that he set up a residence there for an entire year. As a goodwill gesture, they sought to pay him a visit. "So when we were asked about the film we would say, 'Can we go to the Bahamas?'" The Beatles' word was law, and it was director Richard Lester's duty to make it happen. "We were told, 'You're going to film in the Bahamas. Write a scene.'"
9. The Beatles' record-breaking Shea Stadium concert drew over 55,000 fans – including a young Whoopi Goldberg.
The Beatles gave birth to arena rock on August 15th, 1965, when their U.S. summer tour kicked off at New York City's Shea Stadium. The Mets' newly constructed home was overrun with over 55,000 Beatlemaniacs, setting an attendance record for a music event. Among the fans were future Beatle wives Barbara Bach – who married Starr in 1981 – and Linda Eastman (McCartney). Bach was merely there to chaperone her younger sister, while Eastman was royally pissed off by the screams that drowned out the music.
Also in the crowd was nine-year-old Caryn Elaine Johnson, later known as Whoopi Goldberg, who received the surprise of a lifetime thanks to her mother. "There was the announcement of this concert and my mom was like, 'We don't have the money for this,'" she remembers in the film. "I don't know how she did it but she got two tickets. And she didn't tell me. She said, 'We need to go somewhere.' I said, 'Where are we going?' And she said, 'I'll let you know when we get there.'"
The pair took the long subway ride to Queens, much to the little girl's confusion. "We get out and I say, 'Where are we?' And she says, 'We're at Shea Stadium.' And I said, 'Why?' And she held up two tickets. And all I remember is my head going [mimics explosion]."
10. The Beatles were nearly killed at several of their concerts.
Touring was a perilous business even in the early days of Beatlemania. The size of the crowds was unparalleled, as was the degree of the fervor. "When we drove up to the stage door, the Beatles were almost crushed completely by youngsters who backed themselves up against the wall," Kane described in one of his radio reports. "They broke about 50 windows throwing rocks, jellybeans, undershirts, sandals. The situation was one of sheer havoc even though the police did their best to stop it."
This was far from an isolated incident. During a 1964 concert in Vancouver, 7,000 kids broke through the barricade and stampeded the stage, resulting in 240 being taken to the hospital for treatment. Derek Taylor, the Beatles' press officer, bemoaned the laid-back attitude of the local police detail in each new city. "They all say, 'We know our own people. We know police potential and we're going to be able to handle this.' But what they've never seen is a Beatle crowd. This is the biggest thing that's ever happened. There's no question about it. It's like nothing before. It's not like Presley, not like Sinatra, it's not like the late President Kennedy. It's the Beatles, and they are without precedent."
The hazards had increased exponentially by 1966. As the venues swelled to arena size, so too did the chance for violence. A performance at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles was interrupted when fans rushed the stage, leading to a showdown with billy-club-wielding police. Dozens were injured, and it took two hours for authorities to restore some semblance of order. Even more troubling, the band received a torrent of death threats as a result of supposedly anti-religious statements made by Lennon. Ku Klux Klan members picketed many of their shows, promising to assassinate them.
Even nature seemed to be against them. Most of the open-air stadiums lacked proper shelter, and several shows were forced to continue despite torrential downpours. Clutching electric guitars, and flanked by stacks of amps and mics, the threat of electrocution was very real. "We flew off to St. Louis and it was pouring rain," recalls tour roadie Ed Freeman, who freely admits that his only qualification for the role was his friendship with the Beatles' support band, the Remains. "My job was to sit backstage with my hand on the plug and the instructions were: If anyone fell down, knocked out by the shock, then I would pull the plug and that would stop the show. It was a joke." Within days they would swear off touring for the rest of their career.
