Holy crap, an update.
On the internet there has apparently formed a rather large backlash against The Beatles from people saying they suck various things they probably did not (I say "probably" because it was the sixties). Anyway, the backlash seems to come less from the band's music and more from the fact that they are so often billed as "the greatest band of all time". So let me state clearly: the most important and influential rock band of all time? Perhaps. The best? Probably not.
Rock and roll, like most genres, changes and evolves as time goes by, and every once in a while it needs to be reshaped, typically whenever the existing style has started to grow stale. The grunge revolution of the 90s, for example, or the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll attitude of the 70s. The Beatles were one of the bands that did this, famously starting the British Invasion of the late 60s and early 70s. So to understand why the Beatles were so huge, you should understand the stale state of rock and roll before they arrived.
Record company executives are not a new phenomenon, nor are they particularly worse now than they were in the 50s and 60s. For years the basic formula was "pick up a bunch of kids that might or might not know how to play instruments, call them a band, sell a million albums, repeat". And it worked. Enter The Beatles. The thing that made the Beatles so big wasn't so much that they were especially good, it's that they were better. Now, I happen to own a pretty solid collection of vintage Mad Magazines from the era, and for several months after their introduction Mad was willing to brush off the Beatles as another one of the over-hyped talentless kludges of the era, albeit one that deserved a bit more attention due to their ridiculous hair and silly British accents. They came around, but the fact that they could keep this up shows that the Beatles were not mind-blowingly talented performers or song-writers. A lot of the backlash towards the Beatles comes from this period of music, and whenever someone says "The Beatles are the best band ever!", someone else is sure to bring up "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."
The thing is, though, the Beatles were at least competent. They could carry a tune, and pretty soon people were willing to admit they could hum along with most of their songs. This is what I mean when I say "they weren't good, they were better"; they were better than just about anything else on the radio or in the record store, at least when it came to rock. And unlike many performers, they didn't stop improving once they got famous. They kept practicing and experimenting and getting better. When people talk about the Beatles in hushed, reverent tones, they're almost referring to their later stuff, typically starting with Revolver or thereabouts.
Anyway, we all know the story. John goes Yoko-loco and the band breaks up. This is where we get to the other crucial part of the Beatles: their legacy. The Beatles were pioneers of a number of things that have become mainstays of pop and rock: the I-V-vi-IV chord progression, the use of instruments besides guitars, bass guitars, and drums in rock music, multi-track vocals, even just the idea of slower, more methodical rock like "The Long and Winding Road"; even if they didn't invent the ideas or use them first, they were the ones that codified their usage and they're the reasons we still use them today. A pretty impressively massive number of musicians will claim their inspiration was the Beatles or an artist or group who were themselves inspired by The Beatles.
Famously, when asked if he thought Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world, John Lennon replied "He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles." So, no, I'm not going to ask you to like the Beatles. Like any band, they have a particular style that some people like and some people don't. But I am a little sick of hearing they suck.
