Music changed after they had split. The hippy days and Mersey Beat days were all gone
Music was changing before they came on the scene. It changed numerous times while they were on the scene. The Hippy era of peace and love was all but gone before they were in the studio being filmed by Michael Lindsay Hogg in January '69, having been replaced by something altogether more practical....and violent. Mersey Beat was over before the Hippy era even began.
So yes, music changed after they had split. Change is in the DNA of the arts, no matter who is the influential innovator of a particular time.
In the UK it moved into Tamla Motown, Soul, Prog rock and Glam rock. The Beatles may have just fell by the wayside with all that going on
The Beatles were ruthlessly competitive and had seen off big time competition all through their career. They saw off the competition in Hamburg when they were unknown. They saw off the Liverpool groups. They saw off Cliff. They saw off the Hollies, the Animals and the Dave Clark 5. Then they competed with Dylan, the Byrds, the Stones, the Who and the Kinks, Stax and Motown. And saw them off. They competed with the Mothers of Invention, Hendrix and Cream, Pink Floyd and the entire psychedelic movement and thrashed it. They saw off the British blues boom. They pit their wits against country rock. Etc, etc, etc. To the extent that they were revered by almost all wings of the competition. They did this because they liked the music of the competition and were forever incorporating different elements of the competition into their music. Ska. Reggae. Folk. Orchestral. The avant~garde. Ragas. Brass band. Music hall. Mellotrons. Sitars and dilrubas. Strings and brass. Timpani. Backwards recording. Synthesizers. Etc, etc, etc. Roger Daltrey called the Who "the original Japanese thinking machine ¬> you invent it, we'll copy it."
Sorry Roger, the Beatles beat you to it and continued to beat you
at it. They pioneered as well as copied new studio techniques and hated repeating themselves. Even as they broke up, their last album, "Abbey Road", showed them doing a Who {A Quick one and Tommy} with their version, which was the medley.
They saw off competition even when they no longer existed !
A lot of the 60's groups were quickly forgotten in the early 70's
Equally though, a lot of them {Bowie, Bolan, the Who, the Stones, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin, [Small] Faces, Free, Clapton, Pink Floyd, Simon & Garfunkel, Marvin Gaye, Fleetwood Mac, Procul Harum, Ten Years After, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, to name but a few} weren't.
After that we had Punk, Disco and New Wave. Again would they have fitted into the later part of the 70's?
Punk was at its zenith in 1977. Wings were that year's Christmas no.1 with "Mull of Kintyre", which was the first single to sell 2 million UK copies. That same year, the rock press sparked a frenzy by claiming that Klaatu's debut LP was a secretly reunited Beatles. Two years later, I had a music magazine that put out a request for John to stop talking peace with Yoko and to start making great rock'n'roll records again. And just as I got into the Beatles in the summer of '76, the papers here were full of front page headlines about them reuniting. I haven't seen it since, but I distinctly remember either the Sun or the Mirror having a headline that said something like, "Yeah ! Yeah ! Yeah !" about John, Paul and Ringo saying they'd play together again. The by-line was "It's all up to you, George." In that 1980 Playboy interview, John discusses the million + dollar offer of Sid Bernstein for the band to reunite.
Yeah, I think the Beatles would have fitted into the latter part of the 70s. But I'm awfully glad they weren't an active band by then.
