The Inconsistency of The Beatles’ Album Titles

So. I'm doing some music history research, and for this particular project I'm having to look at the Billboard charts each week in the 1960s. That’s when I noticed something: there in the Top 200 is an album called “The Beatles’ Second Album.” I’ve never heard of this before, and so I started digging.

Turns out, the Beatles albums have different names in the UK than they did for their original US releases. For example, the Beatles had an album titled "With the Beatles" released in the UK on November 22, 1963 (I wonder if anything else happened that day?) which included 14 songs and a runtime of 33 minutes, but when it released in the US in January of 1964, it was titled "Meet The Beatles" and only included 12 tracks and a runtime of just over 26 minutes.

The reason seems to be that Capitol Records was trying to maximize profit for American audiences, go figure. This strategy included releasing more albums with less songs. As I was pulling on that string, I found out that 7 albums released in the UK before Sgt. Peppers, but that translated to 11 US albums.

It seems that at the time UK audiences were more accustomed to 14 song albums, while US record companies typically only went with 10-12.

In some cases (as was the case with “With the Beatles” and “Meet the Beatles”), there’s a pretty direct correlation between a Beatles UK release and its US counterpart. (Note how the US release bills this as “the first album” - despite it being the 2nd album from the Beatles (and in fact, the second released in the US…but that’s another story)

The same could roughly be said of “Beatles for Sale” which released in the UK in 1965, and it’s US counterpart “Beatles ‘65”

However, not all of the US releases were direct counterparts to UK releases. As was the case with the confusingly titled “The Beatles Second Album” (which was the third released in the US…but only the second released by Capitol Records). This release was a compilation of a number of Beatles tracks and doesn’t directly correlate to any UK album.

There’s not really a major point that I’m trying to make here - mostly an observation. And while I can’t say much about the research project I’m working on, I assure you - this is 1000% unrelated. A complete side quest. It is literally something I just happened to notice while looking over the Billboard charts from 1964.

You want to know what else I noticed in the 1964 Billboard charts? Alvin and the Chipmunks sing the Beatles is a thing. It’s a very real thing that actually happened. It was in the US top 200 for three weeks in 1964. Maybe this is common knowledge and I’m completely late to the party, but wow, I did not see this coming. You can listen to that glorious work of art here.

Let’s land this plane before I get any further off whatever point I was trying to make. I hope you have enjoyed this particular oddity of music history I happened upon.