I think to say that a band was influenced by another is a vastly different thing to saying that they wouldn't have existed without them. As many others have said, if the Beatles hadn't done it, someone else probably would have, but the fact remains that The Beatles did do it. Perhaps what they did wasn't the most groundbreaking thing in the world, if the ideas were already around as is being claimed by some here, but in my personal opinion, managing to make something unpopular popularly accepted is something of an achievement in itself. In many ways, they made experimentation popular, broke the potential string of "more of the same" which we're getting quite a lot of in "pop music" today.
Essentially, removing the beatles from history might not cause every subsequent band to cease to exist, but they are a major influence of a large amount of modern music, and the same could be said for any influential band. That said, if they hadn't done it, how long would it have been till someone else did it? Were they ahead of their time? Regardless, anyone arguing the "Your favourite band wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the Beatles" side of things could just include an "or their influential equivalent along an alternate timeline in which the beatles didn't form" in their argument. When it comes down to it, if The beatles didn't do it, then another band would have, in which case that band would have done it and we'd be having the same argument. THe whole thing is pretty trivial.
Let X be the band who released music in the 60's whom are considered to be a massive influence on modern music, in any potential timeline. If one were to remove X entirely, such that there was no replacement band with similar ideas, then many modern bands may not exist.
As The Beatles represent X for our specific timeline, they have a point :P
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