We loved them: yeah, yeah, yeah.

• Author: Leonard, Candy
• Position: Entertainment - The Beatles

LOOKING BACK on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles arrival in the U.S., music fans and cultural observers of all ages often ask, "Can anything like the Beatles happen again?" The question itself is somewhat rhetorical and, a half-century on, acknowledges the singularity of the Beatles phenomenon. Those who lived through it ask the question to validate their belief in the enormous impact the Beatles had on them and, by extension, the culture. The Beatles unified Baby Boomers across a 15-year age range, and these fans, now between 55-70, more or less, express gratitude about being born at the right time to grow up with the Beatles, and believe the experience makes their generation special. Perhaps we should blame the Beatles for Boomers' supposed narcissism.

Younger people with interest in pop culture also know the answer. Sure, there have been other big pop music phenomena over the years --Michael Jackson, U2, Nirvana, Madonna, and Prince come to mind--and there indeed may be various kinds of similarities between the Beatles and these artists. However, the Beatles qua phenomenon was due to a confluence of forces that defined a historical moment. It is not so much that this perfect storm of factors cannot align again, but that time has made these factors irrelevant. The world is a different place, and cultural breakthroughs, by definition, cannot happen twice.

Here are reasons why a Beatles-like phenomenon cannot occur again:

The Beatles had a fan base larger than any performer before or since. The Beatles were a gigantic multinational corporation, and were the first performers to tap the potential of global mass media and sophisticated marketing to reach a large, young audience, newly recognized as consumers. In the U.S. alone, there were 76,000,000 Baby Boomers and half the population was under age 25. Boomers were sold Beatles just as they were sold Etch-A-Sketch, Hoola Hoops, and Lincoln Logs.

There were relatively few entertainment outlets during the Beatle years. Simply put, it was easier to get hugely famous in the 1960s. Today there are an infinite number of entertainment choices but, if you were not watching the Beatles American television debut on CBS's "The Ed Sullivan Show," there only were a few other channels to watch. With the proliferation of outlets came market segmentation. Every major city had one or two Top 40 stations that played the Beatles, but when FM radio came along in 1967, it split boomer radio listeners into two camps and exposed listeners to deeper cuts from artists that emerged as a result of the pop music renaissance the Beatles initiated three years earlier. Today, there are more than 50 FM radio formats targeting particular market segments. Artists have smaller audiences now. There no longer can be a "next big thing," only a lot of smaller things.

Media saturation in U.S. households reached absolute levels during the Beatle years. The...