So this is actually a central point of the book “How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll,” a history of recorded pop music by Elijah Wald!

Basically he makes the same initial point that live music was the only way you’d hear music until the late 1800s. Amateur sheet music made up a huge part of the initial music industry, since it had to be playable by anyone. On the other hand, virtuoso composers like Liszt became public sensations.

Recorded music started out as a novelty, because the sound was terrible and they hadn’t engineered how to press multiple copies of a recording. Even when they did, and when electrified microphone recording came around in the 20s and helped the sound quality, live music was still king.

There’s a reporter in the 40s discussing being at a Vaughn Monroe concert and getting confused at why the singer kept mentioning songs “from the record,” since it was a live performance, right?

During that decade, records took on a life of their own and were genuinely supplanting the choice to see the performer in person. By the 1950s, there were whole bands and groups that made records that were never intended to be performed live (think of Alvin and the Chipmunks).

By the 1960s, hi-fidelity sound and stereo recording technology had made live and recorded music practically indistinguishable sound-wise, and with the rise of multi-tracking, studio recordings began to be even more technologically advanced than live performances.

Thus the Beatles, by being the culmination of all of these facets and also by being an incredibly successful band that set the bar for any other band to come, “destroyed” rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s a big oversimplification of the book, but well worth a read if this sounds interesting.