The Beatles Influence
The album format
"Prior to The Beatles, record albums were of secondary consideration to 45s in mass marketing. Albums largely contained filler material along with one or two worthwhile singles. The Beatles, with the ability to produce albums with consistently well-regarded material and the desire to rarely use singles as part of full albums, helped to define the album as the preferred mechanism for releasing popular music, which in turn resulted in the development of new FM radio formats such as Album-oriented rock (AOR) in the 1970s. The Beatles' song "Hey Jude" was memorable in its time for helping to break down the barriers around pop music.
To conform with the preferences of commercial radio, most (though not all) songs released as singles up to that time were about three minutes in length; "Hey Jude" clocked in at over seven minutes and helped make it acceptable for a single to be longer than standard length. Even album covers changed during this period, becoming increasingly artistic -- works of art in their own right. (The Beatles seemed to rebel against this in 1968 when they released their plain white album The Beatles, known as the White Album.) While they were not alone in promoting these developments, they were clearly at the forefront of them.
The Beatles' album covers themselves were well-thought-out designs that have been copied and imitated hundreds of times by everyone from The Simpsons and The Muppets to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. This has especially been the case with the covers of With the Beatles, which featured the four band members' faces half-darkened with shadows; The White Album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. Abbey Road in London has become a popular tourist attraction with countless numbers of tourists taking their photo walking along the crosswalk in front of Abbey Road studios.
Ironically, one of their most experimental and personal cover designs was one which was released and recalled shortly thereafter -- the infamous Butcher Sleeve, photographed by Robert Whitaker. Originally intended by Whitaker to be one of a triptych of allegorical studies of the group, the photo was selected for the cover of the US version of the album Yesterday & Today; thousands of covers were printed, but the "Butcher Sleeve" version of the album was famously withdrawn from sale just prior to release because of complaints from retailers. It has since become one of the rarest and most valuable of all Beatles collectibles."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles_influence