The
Anthologies are basically official bootlegs. Demos, outtakes, live tracks, and such. Get them last, if ever.
The main albums are:
- Please Please Me (1963)
- With the Beatles (1963)
- A Hard Day's Night (1964)
- Beatles For Sale (1964)
- Help! (1965)
- Rubber Soul (1965)
- Revolver (1966)
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
- Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
- The White Album (1968)
- Abbey Road (1969)
- Let It Be (1970)
Everything from
Rubber Soul to
Abbey Road is legendary, so grab anything from in there.
Let It Be is also really good, although very rough around the edges, so opinions of it are generally mixed.
If you dig on the earlier stuff, the two soundtracks,
A Hard Day's Night and
Help!, are probably the best out of them. I recommend getting the later, more essential stuff and working your way back, though.
There's also
Yellow Submarine (1969), although it isn't considered a hugely important release because it only has four new songs (and half of them suck). It comes in two editions--the original soundtrack (half of which is George Martin's instrumental score) and the re-released "songbook" (entirely Beatles songs from the film, remastered and sounding pretty good)--and I think the songbook is the more listenable of the pair. Plus, you now get your choice between the regular
Let It Be and the revised
Let It Be Nekkid (2003) (get the original first).
The two
Past Masters compilations contain a bunch of non-album singles and B-sides. Basically, if you have all the albums, they complete your collection by giving you everything else they released while together. But they contain some of their most well known songs, so they're worth looking into even for casual fans.
The
1 compilation also has a lot of these non-album singles, so if you start there and then get the albums later, you won't have as much overlap as you think. The double Red and Blue Albums are meatier, if you're into compilations.