4 by the Beatles
1965 US 7" EP by The Beatles
4 by the Beatles is an EP of music by English rock band the Beatles. Released on 1 February 1965, it is the third of three Beatles EPs released in the United States and the second of two by Capitol Records.
History
Although the Beatles' first EP released by Capitol, Four by the Beatles, did not achieve the success the label would have hoped, it did well on the singles chart, which enabled Capitol to create a new series called the "4-By" series, which acted like a "super single". The idea was to market a set of four songs to "complement the artist's singles and albums and not compete with the performer's current hit single". Accordingly, the series' name is a reference to the first Beatles EP from Capitol.
Although initially intended to appear as a single by releasing the "4-By" in a soft sleeve and thus "distinguish the '4-By' product from EP's", 4 by the Beatles was packaged in a cardboard sleeve, similar to regular EP releases. Billboard did not chart the record as a single, either, but as an EP; on the Hot 100, it peaked at number 68, which is also the highest position it achieved on the Cash Box chart. Capitol deleted 4 by the Beatles from its catalogue on 31 December 1965.
4 by the Beatles features four songs that Capitol had released on Beatles '65 in December 1964. All four of these songs were also released on their UK album Beatles for Sale.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1947993. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1965 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “4 by the Beatles” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.