Apple Records 40 Years Later

“It’s a busi­ness con­cern­ing records, films and elec­tron­ics,” John Lennon said at the time. “We want to set up a sys­tem whereby peo­ple who just want to make a film about any­thing don’t have to go on their knees in somebody’s office. Prob­a­bly yours.”

Lennon described Apple Records and its par­ent com­pany, Apple Corps, as a place where any­body with a good idea could get fund­ing. If that sounds like a ques­tion­able busi­ness plan, keep in mind that The Bea­t­les were mak­ing a lot of money in 1968.

“As far as I can tell, the idea behind Apple was a tax dodge,” music jour­nal­ist Dou­glas Wolk says. “The top tax rate in Eng­land at that time was enor­mous.” And John Lennon said some­thing to the effect of, “We talked to our accoun­tants. We real­ized we could either give the money to the gov­ern­ment or we could put it into a business.”

The band’s advis­ers report­edly rec­om­mended Bea­t­les greet­ing cards or invest­ing in real estate. The Bea­t­les rejected those ideas. Just three months after it launched, Apple Records released its first sin­gle, “Hey Jude.”

From the begin­ning, The Bea­t­les’ mem­bers used Apple to put out records by other artists they liked, as Lennon and Paul McCart­ney explained in a 1968 tele­vi­sion interview.

“We hope to make a thing that’s free, where peo­ple can come and do and record,” Lennon said.

“It’ll be big, I think,” McCart­ney added. “It’s like a top. We’re gonna set it going and hope for the best.”

Apple put out three other sin­gles on the same day it released “Hey Jude,” includ­ing “Those Were the Days” by Welsh singer Mary Hop­kin. That song also topped the charts.

Apple Records wasn’t the first label founded by musi­cians, but like most things The Bea­t­les did, it attracted a lot of atten­tion. The Apple Corps offices in London’s Sav­ille Row (see left) became a mag­net for assorted freaks.

B.P. Fal­lon was 21 when The Bea­t­les’ pub­li­cist hired him to write bio­graph­i­cal notes about Apple record­ing artists, includ­ing a then-unknown singer the label had signed named James Tay­lor. Fal­lon says that wasn’t all he did.

“One of my jobs at Apple was to make sure that Paul McCartney’s grass was of suf­fi­ciently good qual­ity,” Fal­lon says. “Which meant that one had to duti­fully test out the sam­ples of all these eager-beaver hash deal­ers. He never once com­plained about my choice.”

Fal­lon insists that work did get done at Apple, but despite a string of ini­tial hits, the com­pany was a finan­cial dis­as­ter. The film, elec­tron­ics and cloth­ing divi­sions didn’t work out. And after The Bea­t­les broke up, Apple seemed to exist mostly to sue peo­ple. It took its dis­trib­u­tors, EMI and Capi­tol Records, to court over unpaid roy­al­ties. It sued Apple Com­puter over trade­mark violations.

Accord­ing to Bruce Spizer — the author of The Bea­t­les on Apple Records — it’s Apple Com­puter and its ubiq­ui­tous iPod that seem closer today to what The Bea­t­les were try­ing to do back in 1968.

“Every­thing that John had envi­sioned — this thing that was going to be records, films and elec­tron­ics — and 40 years later, we’ve got music, videos and com­puter all tied together,” Spizer says. “And one of the com­pa­nies that’s exploit­ing this is Apple. Although it’s not The Bea­t­les’ Apple that’s doing it now.”

Arguably, the real influ­ence of Apple Records is sym­bolic. Before Apple, Wolk says, most artist-run labels were just van­ity projects.

“After Apple Records, there’s this idea float­ing around that the musi­cal genius’ genius doesn’t extend to their own work,” Wolk says. “That they can spot genius in other peo­ple, that they can pro­mote other people’s work.”

It’s an idea that gained cur­rency in the 1980s and ’90s, as musi­cians showed that they could suc­cess­fully run record labels, too. Today, artists are tak­ing on even more of the respon­si­bil­i­ties that used to fall on the suits at record labels.