Without the airplay that greeted the Beatle-penned I Wanna Be Your Man and the opportunity for their management to promote them as Your Teenage Rebellion Alternative to the nicely-suited and cute Fabsters, would Mick Jagger and Co have progressed beyond an existence as hard core blues fans on the periphery of the popular music scene?
More significantly, pre-Lennon & McCartney, song writing was the domain of professional writers (even if they were teenage professional songwriters) who simultaneously churned out quantity and quality, then hawked the results around publishers, managers and A&R men in the hope some of their work would end up being recorded. As a result, when someone recorded an album it was. more than likely, made up of a bunch of disparate songs by a variety of different writers with a fair balance between new material and songs that had a slightly longer lineage.
That didn’t change overnight. Looking at the vinyl sleeves of the early Beatle albums we see six out of fourteen tracks on Please Please Me, With The Beatles and Beatles For Sale drawn from non-Beatle sources.
Post-A Hard Day’s Night things changed. Increasingly, performers wrote their own material, working away until they had accumulated enough for an album, even if it was a Greatest Hits thing with a handful of filler thrown in to pad it out to a respectable length.
One more change, that wouldn’t have happened without the buckets of money raked in by performers who wrote their own material, and, increasingly, controlled their own publishing, thus providing themselves with a couple of income streams...
Some ten years after it burst onto the scene,playing rock ‘n’ roll music became a viable long-term career choice.
Assuming that you had access to an archive of the music press dating back to the early-sixties, if you were to peruse the profiles of the latest shooting stars who’d shot into prominence, the sort of thing that helps a reporter fill some space without actually having to stretch his or her mind too far, I suspect that you’d almost invariably find a question about long-term ambitions.