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The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960. With members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, they became widely regarded as the foremost and most influential act of the rock era. In the early 1960s, their enormous popularity first emerged as "Beatlemania", but as the group's music grew in sophistication, led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney, they came to be perceived as an embodiment of the ideals shared by the counterculture of the 1960s.

Their continued commercial and critical success assisted many cultural movements—including a shift from American artists' global dominance of rock and roll to British acts (British Invasion), the proliferation of young musicians in the 1960s who formed new bands, the album as the dominant form of record consumption over singles, the term "Beatlesque" used to describe similar-sounding artists, and several fashion trends. At the height of their popularity, Lennon controversially remarked that the group had become "more popular than Jesus". The Beatles were still challenged for record sales and artistic prestige, mainly by the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. Many of the Beatles' music experiments were also not without precedent. However, no other acts provoked as many changes in the pop mainstream than the Beatles or Dylan, having opened new spaces for creative advancement and exploiting them to an exceeding degree. Some of the Beatles' unusual production techniques later became part of normal recording practice.

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