boy band

boy band, in popular music, a vocal group made up of young male performers whose music is geared toward teenage and preteen music fans, especially girls. Vocal harmonies and choreography are important elements of their music and performances, although some boy bands have also played their own instruments and written their own songs. Indeed, boy bands are often defined as “prefab,” as in prefabricated by a record label with a carefully crafted image. Famous boy bands include the Monkees, the Jackson 5, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, One Direction, and BTS.

The roots of the boy band

The term boy band is thought to date to the 1980s, when an explosion of young, visually appealing, all-male groups such as Duran Duran, Wham!, Menudo, New Edition, and New Kids on the Block became popular on the charts and on MTV.

The demand for such groups, however, was nothing new. In the 1930s several all-male rhythm-and-blues (R&B) groups, such as the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots, were mainstays on the radio and in nightclubs. Their harmonies formed the basis for doo-wop, which emerged in the 1950s and early ’60s. Doo-wop also evolved from urban street-corner harmony groups, whose members were often young boys who knew each other from school, church, mutual family and friends, or the neighborhood. Many doo-wop and other male vocal groups of the era, including the Temptations, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and Dion and the Belmonts, formed when their members were teenagers.

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The Beatles enter the picture

Another important predecessor of modern boy bands was the Beatles, who have even been called the prototypical boy band. The group started out in Liverpool, England, in 1957 as the Quarrymen, a skiffle band whose members included local teenagers John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. By 1962 they had switched to rock and roll, added Ringo Starr as their drummer, and were performing as the Beatles. They also hired Brian Epstein, an aspiring manager with a keen marketing talent. The group sparked such a frenzy among young female fans that a new term was invented to describe their popularity: Beatlemania.

Many other all-male rock bands rode the coattails of Beatlemania to similar success, including the British groups the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, and the Dave Clark Five. In the United States the Beach Boys drew from the tradition of barbershop quartet harmonies as well as rock and roll.

However, these groups notably formed autonomously, as opposed to having a Svengali-like manager. They typically wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, and experimented with different types of music to suit changing tastes or the emerging counterculture.

Hey, hey, it’s the Monkees

The phenomenal success of the Beatles and their ilk inspired record producers and managers to form similar male groups to capitalize on audience interest in new young talent. The Monkees, for example, were handpicked from more than 400 audition applicants for a TV show based on a Beatles-like band. Similarly, the Jackson 5 were five brothers whose father, Joseph Jackson, had shaped them into an R&B group in the hopes of breaking his struggling family out of working-class Gary, Indiana. Other groups of this era that formed in a similar fashion were the Osmonds, a group of Mormon brothers from Utah noted for their clean-cut image. Their success helped spur on two more Osmond siblings who performed as the brother-sister duo Donny and Marie. Bubblegum groups, a pop and rock subgenre whose music has an easy sing-along quality, such as the Scotland-based Bay City Rollers, were also a hit with young female fans.

Boy bands take over

A band’s visual appeal became even more important with the rise of music videos in the 1980s. Some music producers, such as Maurice Starr (New Edition and New Kids on the Block), Lou Pearlman (*NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and O-Town), and Simon Cowell (Westlife and One Direction), started to specialize in forming or developing boy bands.

Some boy bands were met with critical praise and significant industry success. The R&B quartet Boyz II Men, for example, won several Grammy Awards in the 1990s for such hits as “End of the Road” (1992), and other young all-male groups of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as Hanson and Backstreet Boys, garnered Grammy nominations for best new artist.

A number of former boy band members launched solo careers after leaving their band or after their group disbanded. Those who thrived on their own include Michael Jackson (the Jackson 5), Ricky Martin (Menudo), George Michael (Wham!), Bobby Brown (New Edition), Justin Timberlake (*NSYNC), and Harry Styles (One Direction).

Criticism and controversies

Despite those successful examples, the boy band concept has some negative connotations. Many critics have called boy band music “formulaic,” “cheesy,” or “inauthentic.” Others have argued that the music industry exploits young artists and have called for a ban on performers younger than 18.

Some former boy banders themselves, including Take That alum Robbie Williams, have been vocal about the drawbacks of achieving fame at a young age, especially after the death of One Direction member Liam Payne in October 2024. After Take That’s onetime manager made disparaging comments about Williams’s mental health struggles in the documentary Boybands Forever (2024), Williams fired back in an Instagram post: “Nearly all members of boybands it seems have at some point a mental breakdown….If you are following the story closely, you can’t help but notice a pattern emerge. Boys join a boyband. The band becomes huge. Boys get sick.”

Despite the criticism and controversies, boy bands continued to be a lucrative part of the music industry in the 21st century, evidenced by the success of newer incarnations such as K-pop sensation BTS.