Living a Memorable Consumer Experience: The Epic of the Beatles Concerts (1963-1966)

Abstract

The Beatles are still a major reference in popular music today. The band wrote more than 200 songs and 12 original albums between 1962 and 1970, of which about thirty are hits. At the origin of a mass hysteria phenomenon, especially among teen girls, the Beatles were the first to organize tours in stadiums, in front of an audience of tens of thousands of fans shouting, loudly and continuously. Many archival images allow to measure the intensity of what is called Beatlemania, including the famous August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium in New York. The paper indicates that the participation in the concerts can be analyzed in reference to a memorable experience lived by the fans, independently of the quality of the musical performance of the Beatles, almost inaudible considering the screams whose volume is superior to that of a jumbo jet at takeoff.