markus heuger's
beabliography

Beabliography

Abstract 0368

Einbrodt, Ulrich D. (2001), "The Beatles in the Internet. An analysis of the presentation of the Beatles in the World Wide Web." In: Yrjö Heinonen, Markus Heuger, Sheila Whitely, Terhi Nurmesjärvi and Jouni Koskimäki (eds.), Beatlestudies 3. Proceedings of the Beatles 2000 conference. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä (Department of Music, Research Reports 23), 2001, 57-68.

The internet is offering a gigantic variety of material — millions of pieces of information for nearly every thinkable question. For musicians, the internet provides an immensely useful medium: for almost every artist of the past and present there are bibliographies, pictures, theoretical articles, available CD's, midi files, discographies, merchandise products, tour plans, lyrics and much more. Official and so-called unofficial homepages provide innumerable pieces of material. And what about The Beatles and their important influence on popular music? How are they presented in the net?

The aim of the article is to analyse the different ways of presentation of The Beatles in the net, categorize the pages so that the manifold supply will be structured to certain specified elements, to mention just a few: what will be the emphasis within a page that offers biographical background, i.e. which time of The Beatles is stressed, which band member, which album and instrument? Can we learn something about the music that goes beyond the information given in an encyclopaedia on popular music? Also, it will be of importance if the page is written in an euphemistic style or not and which kind of sources and material the author - if mentioned - has used to design his or her page. It will also be of interest to look for midi files and their quality, the availability of rare recordings and bootlegs, the possible existence of musical, biographical and further details that are hardly known yet. As there are many newsgroups that deal with The Beatles, these should be also of interest.

To find material on The Beatles, search catalogues need to be supplied with suitable keywords: Aside the band name itself, all names of the four members and in addition all names that have anything to do with The Beatles will lead to numerous results. So former musicians like Sutcliff or Best will be as important as George Martin, Ono or Lester. Song titles and albums will be as helpful as terms like beat music, Liverpool, Apple or EMI. The results will then be collected and classified. To demonstrate the crucial points — with regard to the contents — that are to be found among the thousands of sites that deal with The Beatles; to establish a model of classification for the different sites; to give help for an assessment of sites; to collect a link-compilation that will be useful to every Beatles-lover.

As the internet is an everchanging medium, the results will reflect the material for the time of the research; but as the topic — The Beatles — will stay the same, the results and the classification will be a ground to build upon, new contributions will follow and can be added to a kind of virtual bibliography.