Originally Posted by Rainard Jalen

Dude, the point is not complicated. The Byrds, in their recording days, were never NOT an electric band. Do you get that? They never recorded and released anything that wasn't electric. Their first album and their first single were all totally electric. Whatever they were before they started releasing music is totally irrelevant to the general public. So you can say that the Beatles were the reason they decided to be an electric band in the first instance. You cannot say that they went electric, however, because there was nothing that wasn't electric in their discrography. When we talk about a band changing from one thing into another, we are generally talking about a great shift evidenced in their discography (e.g. Prince's 180 degree shift from light disco artist into new wave with Dirty Mind). We don't care what somebody was before they even started recording.

We weren't discussing the Grateful Dead.

Yes. And for a large part, they were. This however does not indicate that it was the Beatles that convinced Dylan to go electric. Like I said, he went electric in 1965, LONG after the onset of Beatlemania.