Introducing... the Beatles
| Introducing... The Beatles | |||||
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| Studio album by The Beatles | |||||
| Released | 10 January 1964 | ||||
| Recorded | 11 September and 26 November 1962, 11 and 20 February 1963 | ||||
| Studio | EMI Studios, London | ||||
| Genre | Rock and roll | ||||
| Length | 27:39 | ||||
| Label | Vee-Jay | ||||
| Producer | George Martin | ||||
| The Beatles North American chronology | |||||
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| The Beatles United States chronology | |||||
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| Singles from Introducing... The Beatles | |||||
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| Allmusic |   |
Introducing... The Beatles is the first Beatles album released in the United States. Originally scheduled for a July 1963 release, the LP came out on 10 January 1964, on Vee-Jay Records, ten days before Capitol's Meet the Beatles!. The latter album, however, entered the U.S. album chart one week before the former. Consequently, when Meet The Beatles! peaked at #1 for eleven consecutive weeks, Introducing...The Beatles stalled at #2 where it remained nine consecutive weeks. It was the subject of much legal wrangling, but ultimately, Vee-Jay were permitted to sell the album until late 1964, by which time it had sold more than 1.3 million copies. On 24 July 2014 the album was certified gold and platinum by the RIAA.
The Beatles' recording contract that began May 1962 with Parlophone in the United Kingdom gave the parent corporation EMI Records rights to offer any of the group's recordings to the various labels EMI owned in many countries of the world. However, EMI's United States subsidiary, Capitol Records, declined to release the "Please Please Me" single. Following this, Transglobal, an EMI affiliate that worked to place foreign masters with US record companies , negotiated with several labels before Vee-Jay Records signed a licensing agreement giving it the right of first refusal on Beatles' records for five years. As part of that agreement, even after its singles releases of "Please Please Me" and "From Me to You" failed to chart above No. 116 on the Billboard Hot 100, Vee-Jay planned to release the Please Please Me album in the US, and received copies of the mono and stereo master tapes in late April or early May 1963.
Originally, Vee-Jay considered releasing the Please Please Me LP unaltered, as it appeared in the UK. A surviving acetate made by Universal Recording Corporation of Chicago, probably in May 1963, contains all 14 songs in the same order as on the UK album, with the title still listed as Please Please Me. But in keeping with the American norm of a 12-song album, Vee-Jay chose instead to omit "Please Please Me" and "Ask Me Why" (which had comprised the first single release) and change the album's title to Introducing... The Beatles. Also, the engineer at Universal in Chicago thought that Paul McCartney's count-in at the start of "I Saw Her Standing There" was extraneous rather than intentionally placed there, so he snipped the "one, two, three" (leaving the "four") from Vee-Jay's mono and stereo masters. Except for those omissions, the order and contents of the album were untouched, resulting in a US album that bore the closest resemblance to a British Beatles LP until Revolver in 1966.
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