Much of both popular and academic writing about creativity in popular music has been characterized

by a conflict between commercial production and artistic creativity. On the one hand,

creativity has been explored with reference to the large-scale structure of the popular music

industry. On the other hand, much of the writing has been based on a Romantic or individualist

notion of creativity, explicit for example in the auteur theory. This line of writing has certainly

been popular with respect to The Beatles. Drawing on recent research on creativity in popular

music and organizational research, the article challenges this dichotomy by focusing on the

interaction between individual creativity and different forms of collaborative creativity in the

production of The Beatles’ records.