When the boy band One Direction this week became the first British group to top the Billboard 200 chart with its debut album — a feat not even the Beatles or Coldplay could pull off — many music fans caught onto a trend that tech-savvy teenage girls have known about for months: Boy bands are hot again.
Not only did One Direction sell 176,000 copies of its album, “Up All Night,” in its first week of release, but the group — whose members ages range from 17 to 20 — has generated mobs of swooning girls everywhere it plays. Nearly 10,000 fans showed up on March 12 for the group’s first television performance in the United States on the “Today” show.
At the same time, the Wanted, another British boy band with a slightly older, sexier vibe, has had a Top 10 hit single on the American charts for weeks with “Glad You Came,”currently at No. 3. And Mindless Behavior, a group of teenage boys from Los Angeles whose songs shade toward R&B and hip-hop, has sold 237,000 copies of its first album, “#1 Girl,” since its release in September, when it made its debut at No. 7 on the albums chart.
“Boy bands are so back, in such a big way — I’ve been saying it for about a month now,” said Sharon Dastur, program director for Z100 (WHTZ 100.3 FM) in New York. “Music is always very cyclical,” she continued. “We had the New-Kids-on-the-Block time and the ’NSync-Backstreet Boys time, and it’s that time again.”
But the definition of a boy band seems to have changed somewhat. Neither One Direction nor the Wanted uses choreographed dance moves like those American bands of a decade ago. And the Wanted has laced its songs with references to partying and sexual hookups, putting a new spin on the usually wholesome formula.
One Direction was formed by Simon Cowell when the boys tried individually for the British version of the “X Factor” in 2010. Mr. Cowell persuaded them to join forces and compete as a group. After they ended up in third place that season, Mr. Cowell signed them to his Syco music label, a division of Sony. Last year they gained fame in Britain with their hit “What Makes You Beautiful.”
The song is an upbeat declaration of love to a simple “La Bamba” chord progression, in which a boy tells an insecure girl that she is beautiful but doesn’t know it. (What teenage girl does not want to hear that message?) Its members — Liam Payne, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik — all look as if they have yet to shave, have distinct hairstyles and are deemed by their fans to be cute in different ways, a prerequisite for boy bands, since part of the fun is having a favorite member to pine for.
Steve Barnett, the chairman of Columbia Records, said it was not a difficult decision to sign One Direction. “Other artists in that category had gotten a little older,” he said. “I just thought there was a void, and maybe they could seize and hold it.”
But Mr. Barnett and his team decided to reverse the usual pattern of releasing a single on radio, then bringing the band to America to do concerts. Instead the label mounted a four-month marketing campaign aimed at building a fan base through social media before a single was ever released or played on the radio here.
Then a social media campaign asked fans to sign petitions and to enter video competitions to win a concert in their town. (Dallas won, and One Direction will perform a concert there on Saturday; the group will play two dates in the New York area in May as part of a national tour.)
The strategy worked. The band’s Facebook followers in the United States rose to 400,000 from 40,000, label executives said. That One Direction topped the American chart underscores how powerful social media sites have become in marketing groups. “What Makes You Beautiful” sold more than 131,000 copies in its first week, even though it had yet to be played on the radio. Radio programmers were flooded with calls from fans.
“Now they are calling the radio station, and the radio station is scratching its head, saying, ‘We don’t even have that record yet,’ ” said Johnny Wright, who managed New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys and ’NSync. “It’s almost like the return of the Beatles. I call it hype, but it’s positive hype because it’s all real. It’s not manufactured. No one paid these kids.”
The Wanted was assembled through a mass audition in 2009 by Ashley Tabor, the president of Global Talent in Britain, the same way that boy bands like ’NSync and the Backstreet Boys were put together by the impresario Lou Pearlman. Armed with songs by the English hit-maker Steve Mac, the Wanted has since released two albums in Britain and had a string of five Top 10 singles there.
Signed to Mercury Records in the United States, the Wanted has had a slower buildup than One Direction. “Glad You Came” at first failed to gain traction when it was released last October. But the song’s popularity started to rise rapidly after the band arrived in January and played on “The Ellen Degeneres Show,” then started a tour of sold-out theaters. When the television show “Glee” covered the song on Feb. 21, it vaulted into the Top 10, where it currently stands at No. 3.
The five members — Tom Parker, Max George, Siva Kaneswaran, Jay McGuiness and Nathan Sykes — range in age from 18 to 23. Mr. George, the lead singer, wears a military-short crew cut and always seems to need a shave.
Their lyrics are also less innocent than those of One Direction. Their backing tracks groove with four-on-the-floor rhythms and have the electronic texture of dance music. The video for “Glad You Came” shows them picking up girls at Ibiza discos and slipping off with them for intimate encounters. (The Wanted will perform on Long Island at the Paramount in Huntington, N.Y., on Sunday.)
“They are the anti-boy band,” said Scooter Braun, who manages the group. “They drink. They party. They are not shy to speak about it.”
Though the British tend to produce new boy bands every couple of years, America has gone through a long dry spell since ’NSync and the Backstreet Boys were at their height in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Jonas Brothers have perhaps been the only boy band of consequence in the last decade.
Boy bands are also expensive to form, requiring songwriters, managers and backup musicians, and sometimes tutors. Record labels are reluctant to invest. “Not everybody can put it together,” said Walter Millsap, who has been cultivating Mindless Behavior, a quartet of 14-year-olds, for four years. “That’s why we have it in spurts.”
That may change now. “You will see more bands coming from America, I suspect, in the next six months,” Mr. Wright said, “because now that the labels are feeling like it is popular again, and there is a way to make money, they cannot sit on the sidelines.”
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