I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands lately; or to be more exact, a lot of time with a newborn in my hands. So what do you do with a lot of time when you have no hands? Listen to the Beatles! What better introduction to the world of music for a baby than the the greatest band ever?

Paul and John: From BFFs to (Fr)enemies

Youtube’s recommendation systems quickly locked on to me, showing me endless amounts of facts and gossip about the Beatles. No story is more intriguing than the intricate relationship between John and Paul. They started out as teenage BFFs, skipping school to play tunes in Paul’s dad’s house. True to their BFF pledge, they decided they will share credit for every song they will ever write, hence the official Lennon/McCartney attribution of most Beatles songs. Next, they spend years sleeping in the same rooms, from rundown apartments in Hamburg, playing Rock n’ Roll covers in German nightclubs, up to Beatlemania and finally becoming, well, more famous than Jesus. What started as a teenage friendship, increasingly became a contentious ego driven rivalry which eventually imploded in a bitter divorce-like breakup. Financial disputes, backstabbing accusations, the whole shebang. It breaks one’s heart to see such true love die…

As with any divorce, Paul was no saint, but I found myself particularly resenting John’s eventual public comments post-breakup. He was pretty much all over the place. Some highlights: saying “Paul died musically”, describing Paul’s wedding as a funeral, claiming Paul’s music was good for elevators, and deriding Paul in songs such as “How do you sleep at night?”. Ouch! One of the 80’s interviews with Paul had him admitting how hurtful this was, especially since he knew John’s criticism would stick. If John says he was the real genius of the Beatles, who is anyone to argue? And stick it did — to this day, many fans view John as the artistic force behind the Beatles and Paul as just a kitschy song writer. How frustrating it must have been to need to defend your own contribution to the undisputed greatest band of all times, and especially against the accusations of your ex-BFF.

But what if John was right? What if John really was by far the greatest Beatle? And where does George fit in in this competition?

Let’s look at the data!

A silver lining in the Beatles bitter breakup was that both John and Paul felt free to take as much credit as possible for every song and in essence disentangling the Lennon/McCartney attribution; I used this data source which specifies the main composer as a reference, even for songs on which they collaborated on (which is basically all their songs). I separated tracks sung by Ringo into their own category, as both John and Paul usually wrote simple songs for Ringo, that fit his singing abilities and happy-go-lucky persona, but were uncharacteristic of their best material.

Let’s start by looking at song counts: out of 208 songs recorded by the Beatles, 71 were written mostly by John, 68 mostly by Paul, 22 by George, 21 were cover songs from their early days, 16 John+Paul songs (songs in which they contributed equally), and 10 that were sung by Ringo, out of which 2 he wrote himself (Don’t Pass Me By and Octopus’s Garden). John and Paul were pretty much equally prolific in terms of their song writing contribution, way ahead of George who only started contributing significantly in their later albums.

So who wrote better songs?

One of the “downsides” of art is that is that it is not objectively measurable. Who is to say if one song is better than another? In order to get around this sticky situation, let’s start by analysing the objective measure of popularity, before we go on to the most subjective of quantifying my own preferences! (perks of being the author of the blog post…)

Spotify to the rescue!

Spotify is awesome, right? The following analysis relies on Spotify stream counts to gouge popularity. Let’s dive into it: