So You Want to Start a Boy Band...

So you're interested in profiting off of the ignorant and as-of-yet unpubertized voices of photogenic young men. Congratulations, you've come to the right place. We're here to show you the ropes and tropes in your quest to ascend the Billboard charts. Had you thought to jump on the Boy Bandwagon 15 years ago, you would be well on your way to making easy millions off of the hard earned allowance money and babysitting profits of young girls. In today's music market, it's a bit more hit or miss, so try your best to adhere to the formula verbatim.

These tried and tested tips should set you on a path to exploiting aspiring juvenile singers. While we can't guarantee success, if you don't hit it big with this secret recipe, you've probably skipped a step somewhere along the way. Check your work and try again. It should all add up if you're doing it right.


Step 1. Hire Lou Pearlman or like-minded manager. Try best to avoid fraud.

Talent manager Lou Pearlman would make a natural first choice as a partner, but his money laundering and conspiracy charges may cause a hiccup on the road to your goal of wallpapering your guest bathroom with hundred dollar bills. If he's not willing to strike up the biz again for fear of setting off a court-appointed anti-boy band formation ankle bracelet, you can probably make do with a cheaper imitator. A Queens accent and noticeably Semitic last name can't hurt, though.


Step 2. Assemble a pack of harmony-prone teenagers

If possible, try to find a group of teens on the street who randomly but conveniently erupt in harmonious song. Failing that route, feel free to hold some open casting calls marketed at crazy stage mothers and former Mickey Mouse Club members. As a last resort, stage the audition process as a reality TV series. As a warning, the popularity of the resultant band will be fleeting, but you do get the added bonus of some fun televised in-house drama. All in all, sort of a tradeoff.


Step 3. Establish the stock characters:

Try your best to populate your newly formed boy band with some combination of the following prototypes:

The Sensitive One: It doesn't hurt to have one guy who exhibits general displays of feelings. Socially awkward and otherwise alienated teen girls eat that stuff up, so cast with their quiet desperation in mind.

The Baby: To effectively market your group to a wide age range of fans, keep your band demographic varied in age. "The Baby" is a necessary component, both for his help filling in on that high F note and his statistically adorable innocence.

The Bad Boy/Rebel: If the guy you've cast as the Bad Boy doesn't yet have any tattoos, feel free to adorn him with some ambiguous Chinese characters and a barbed wire ring around the bicep. He may also wear sunglasses at inopportune times,such as indoors where there's particularly dim lighting. He does what he wants; he doesn't need to follow society's rules about vision.

The Heartthrob: This is the guy you need at the center of every album cover to ensure the screaming young girls come out in full force. He may be a handful sometimes, but just try not to punch his teeth out. Those pearly whites will be paying your bills.

The Older One: To appeal to the full demographic of pop music listeners, it's always okay to have one out-of-place significantly older band member. Just give him a sort of big brother/fatherly role in every photo opportunity and no one will notice that he's 43.


Step 4. Commence ad nauseum photo shoots featuring matching outfits and comically serious expressions

Matching outfits display a sense of solidarity and unity, so your fans will know not to differentiate the band members as individual human beings. The serious expressions establish their reputation as legitimate artists. Just kidding, they just make awesome centerfold shots for BOP! Magazine.


Step 5. Amass Screaming Fans, preferably of the teen girl variety

Recruit a loyal army of young girls with supple vocal chords and a propensity to throw teddy bears and training bras onstage during a particularly soulful performance of your band's hit ballad. Bonus points if they'll cry on camera as they express their unwavering love and adoration for your act.


Step 6. Sell millions of records

This is the backbone of your operation, so invest most heavily in this step. No one really buys records anymore, so this is one of those steps that would have played out better 15 years ago. Nonetheless, you can't have a successful boy band without some sort of musical backup to justify your existence and fame...no matter how inconvenient it is to schedule those pesky recording studio sessions between photo shoots and autograph ops.


Step 7. Release incredibly expensive videos with high production values

Fear no special effect; they will prove invaluable on your quest to mass-marketing your boys' faces as a desirable product. This again may have worked better back in the days of Total Request Live when occasional music videos actually graced the airwaves of Music Television, but try your best to improvise with whatever's left of the genre's diminishing fan base.


Step 8. Decline in Popularity; attempt requisite comeback

Prepare yourself for the inevitable: your once fiercely loyal fans will eventually grow into some semblance of adults and will thus lose screaming interest in what you're peddling. As your popularity wanes, you may want to repackage your band to poise them for a late-breaking comeback. There are no guarantees, but the respect they command is too low to warrant a dignity-excusable cop-out. Milk this one for all it's worth.


Step 9. Hope for the best with members' respective solo careers and/or allow them fade quietly into obscurity

At this point, your boys are no longer boys, but over-the-hill 23-year old men--except the Father Figure guy, who's probably pushing 50 by this point. Some may choose the solo career path, though few will succeed. Others will go quietly into the night, but not everyone will settle for this quick relinquishment of fame. Those select few have several options, the most headline-grabbing of which are to come out of the closet, get arrested, or start a reality television series based on the antics of their colorful family. Choose wisely, though; they only get one shot at that People magazine cover, so we suggest encouraging your guys to tread carefully.


So there you have it: a foolproof formula to establishing and marketing your very own boy band. We're not really supposed to make this sort of sensitive information available to the general public, so consider yourself lucky to be among the privileged privy parties. We don't want this information getting into the wrong hands, of course. Well, not again. And again. Really, it keeps happening. Just be ready to apologize for your eventual fraud charges when they go public, okay? That's pretty much all we can ask.