Beatles for Sale. How Everything They Touched Turned to Gold

Editorial Review

In Beatles for Sale, author John Blaney shows how the group and their inner circle invented so much of what we now recognize as the modern business of making and selling rock music. Beatles for Sale documents the ups and downs of the group as they promoted, advertised, and sold records, played concerts, sold merchandise, made films, and set up publishing and record companies of their own. More than just a business primer, this book tells and exciting story of naiveté and greed, inexperience and blind luck, gullibility and ingenuity. Beatles for Sale explores every aspect of how the group made vast fortunes — and provided the template for everyone who followed.

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Customer Reviews

*****

2008-09-01
A first-rate book with a lot of new (to me) information (like that the whole Apple Computer/Apple Corps legal battles started when George Harrison ran across an Apple Computer ad in a magazine). Also, I've read a ton of Beatles books and interviews, and was impressed that most of the quotes by John, Paul, George and Ringo in this book were quotes I'd never seen before. I do think the author is an unnecessarily sour and incorrect critic about certain things (like complaining about audience noise in the Beatles Shakespeare skit...if you watch the skit on YouTube, that audience noise was obviously encouraged as part of the performance's extreme irreverence). But over all I really liked this book.

A top pick not just for popular music collections, but for business libraries as well

2008-08-14
This new examination of the history of the Beatles considers just how the Beatles and their manager Brian Epstein pioneered not just their music, but the modern music business itself. From how they promoted and sold records to playing concerts, making films, and setting up their own recording companies, BEATLES FOR SALE provides a very different focus from the many books which have revealed their music and lives, making it a top pick not just for popular music collections, but for business libraries as well.

New ground broken in Beatle literature!

2008-07-31
As someone who's read just about everything out there on the Beatles, I was pleasantly surprised by the latest offering from John Blaney (Lennon and McCartney: Together Alone, previously published in separate iterations). There have been a few books out there addressing the business, as opposed to the musical end of the Beatles' career. But none has offered the amount of detail and insight while remaining steadfastly readable as this one.

Blaney takes us on a thorough investigation of how the Beatles became the success that they were in terms of their business dealings, be it through their club dates, their merchandising, their music publishing and so forth. At first glance, such a potentially "dry" study may seem to be of limited interest, but Blaney is such a masterful researcher with a sharp eye for the kind of minutia that fans find irresistible that you'll find yourself drawn in, as I was, to learn the nuts and bolts of how it all happened. (Did you know that the Beatles pioneered the concept of the tour bus?)

Another strength of the book is how it dissects and clarifies long-held myths about their history. The Beatles literary canon is replete with hearsay, but Blaney has done a great job in going back to the original sources to brush aside the shrouding fog of nostalgia, contextualizing their achievements (which only serves to make them more remarkable).

I highly recommend this work for anyone who's been baffled about the ins and outs of their business affairs or Brian Epstein's efforts on their behalf. The good, the bad, and the ugly is laid out in crystal-clear detail - this eminently readable work will stand as one of the more worthy additions to anyone's Beatle bookshelf.