Boy bands are over – and may never come back

Boy bands were once a gold mine for record companies and a dream for would-be heartthrobs. Now, they’re unfashionable and toxic

A few weeks before he died, Liam Payne decided to go back to his roots. The 31-year-old former One Direction star was unveiled as a judge on Building the Band, a new Netflix singing competition to create a new pop group to take on the charts.
With much fanfare it was announced that – alongside Nicole Scherzinger, of The Pussycat Dolls, and Destiny’s Child’s Kelly Rowland – Payne would help hopefuls match with their ideal bandmates sight unseen, in a similar vein to Love is Blind. 
Payne was, arguably, the best-placed of the three judges to advise a manufactured group’s members how to navigate the highs and lows of stardom, having shot to fame almost overnight when One Direction was assembled on The X Factor in 2010 and enduring addiction and mental health issues after they broke up five years later.
The future of Netflix’s new take on the talent show genre is up in the air now, after Payne died following a fall from the third floor balcony of his Buenos Aires hotel room. And his untimely death serves to show how the concept of a boy band feels dated, especially as so many members of notable outfits have struggled with too much fame too young.
The roll call of those who endured a torrid time is a Who’s Who of boy band stars. Robbie Williams became addicted to a cocktail of prescription medicines; Justin Timberlake, originally of NSYNC, said that he had been “financially raped by a svengali”; Payne himself spoke candidly of his alcoholism in recent years, while his bandmate Zayn Malik admitted developing anxiety and an eating disorder at the height of his fame. 
It seems a world away from when boy bands dominated music in the 1990s and 2000s, from New Kids on the Block to Backstreet Boys and Take That to One Direction. Men wanted to be in boy bands; women wanted to be their girlfriends. 
Yet as the music industry has changed, and more boy band members have been willing to go public about the downsides of fame, they have become almost extinct. Other than One Direction, of which Payne was an integral part, just two boy bands – JLS and The Wanted – could qualify as successful. All have long since split. There have been periodic attempts to create a new boy band, but all have flopped. Does anybody remember Nightfall, the boy band that won Gary Barlow’s BBC singing contest in 2017? Even the Take That frontman probably doesn’t.
More than anybody else, Simon Cowell came to symbolise the height of the hyper-manufactured boy band era, as the man behind groups like Westlife and talent shows such as Pop Idol and The X Factor. Cowell also became a divisive figure, however, and has been accused of using One Direction as “money bags and nothing more”.
It has been six years since The X Factor was put out to pasture by ITV, following a collapse in ratings and vanishing interest, but it has not stopped Cowell from trying. The mogul launched auditions for Simon Cowell: Midas Touch this summer to try and create the next supergroup. Cowell, 65, said when he launched the project: “I used to do this 25 years ago, before social media, so now, everyone is in their bedrooms,” he added. “Are they going to audition? I hope so.”
They did not. The first round of auditions, in Gateshead, were cancelled because there had been so few wannabes sign up, while the try-outs in Liverpool drew embarrassingly small crowds. It is said that the whole project has been scrapped and will instead follow Cowell as his “pop dream falls apart”.
The question Cowell appears not to have asked is this: does anybody want a new One Direction? Millennial and Gen Z listeners want “authentic” artists, as opposed to a band thrown together by managers and record labels.
And, even if there were demand, the journey to stardom has become a lot more complicated. For a start, the decline of broadcast TV has made talent shows, which once gave nascent groups oodles of free airtime, an irrelevance. Not that we even need talent shows, adds Spotify’s former chief economist Will Page: “It’s symbolic of the recent collapse in human editorial, be it online or on live television. The algorithm means we all have our own concierge who does our previewing for us, and that means we don’t need talent shows.”
The likes of Spotify have also made competition terrifyingly fierce. “The X Factor and Pop Idol gave kids in the street some way into a marketplace. Now the only marketplace they can get into is a streamer,” says songwriting legend Pete Waterman, who has written Number 1s for the likes of Kylie Minogue, Donna Summer and Cliff Richard. “When there’s 25 million people trying to make records every week on the internet, you’ve got no chance. You can’t have boy bands if you’ve got no outlet.”
Being in a boy band also appears to be less attractive to talented singers, as claims of financial, emotional and sexual exploitation continue to surface. Take NSYNC: the group sued then-manager Lou Pearlman and his record company for defrauding them out of 50 per cent of their earnings instead of taking the agreed one-sixth. (They reached a settlement out of court.)
Pearlman, the man also behind Backstreet Boys, bankrolled a lavish lifestyle by devising the longest-running Ponzi scheme in history using a fake private jet firm. He died in prison, aged 62, eight years ago with £400 million of debt.
Money, too, is a major obstacle. A major label executive reckons that the cost of getting a new boy band off the ground would cost about £20 million – money that is simply not available – with a less than 10 per cent chance of success. “It takes a heavy investment to build a boy band and market that brand,” they say. “That is why the talent shows worked: they had huge audiences in the terrestrial age.”
The executive adds: “It is very hard to build up a personal brand as a group. The solo artists that have broken on TikTok do covers and build up their own social media presence. As a band, you build it up by doing a ton of work gigging. How do you do that as a boy band? You can’t book a gig in a pub or club and sing to a backing track.”
Adding to it all is the ever-growing sense that boy band members, in particular, suffered terribly for their success. Most were plucked from obscurity as teenagers and presented with unimaginable fame and riches that young men struggled to handle. 
In the wake of Payne’s death, Boyzone’s Mikey Graham wrote online: “I think it would be a wise move for record companies to have psychologists on their books from now on in his memory as a duty of care for the vulnerability of their young talent. Fame can be very damaging especially in today’s world. Lots of money. Nobody to help. Lots of yes people. Nobody honest.” Former X Factor judge Sharon Osbourne echoed this sentiment: “We all let you down,” she wrote. “Where was this industry when you needed them?” 
Payne, like Williams before him, had been candid about the toll that young fame (he was just 16 when One Direction formed) took on him. He said that when he was in the band, label executives would confine them to their hotel rooms so that they did not step out of line, but that he just availed himself of the minibar. 
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“So I had a party-for-one that seemed to carry on for many years of my life, and then you look back at how long you’ve been drinking,” Payne said in a 2021 podcast interview. “And, Jesus Christ, that’s a long time, even for someone as young as I am.” He later admitted to having suicidal ideation and that he was “quite lucky to be here still”.
He was far from the only one to suffer. Discussing his eating disorder after leaving One Direction in 2015, Malik said: “The workload and the pace of life on the road, put together with the pressures and strains of everything going on within the band had badly affected my eating habits … I didn’t feel like I had control over anything else in my life, but food was something I could control.” 
Konnie Huq, the former presenter of The Xtra Factor spin-off show, was among those who paid tribute to Payne after his death this week but warned about the psychological toll young fame can take. “With social media and the amount of news channels, you can’t escape that sort of pressure and that level of fame, which I think makes it tougher,” she told the BBC. “We’ve always had stories of sort of massive stars dying young, but I feel that the pressure in general is more in modern living.”
It is not so long ago that being in a boy band like One Direction was the dream for many youngsters. As One Direction marked their 10th anniversary in 2020, Payne posted a screenshot of a text message he sent to his father on the day he joined the group. It said simply: “I’m in a boyband.”
“What a journey… I had no idea what we were in for when I sent this text to my dad years ago at this exact time the band was formed,” Payne wrote in the accompanying caption. “Thanks to everyone that’s supported us over the years and thanks to the boys for sharing this with me.”
But despite the adulation One Direction used to command, there seem to be very few people seeking to follow in the footsteps of Payne and co. now.
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