Key Features of Genre - Boybands & Pop Music

For our coursework music vid, we have decided to focus on Gone by Nsync, the genre Nsync are categorised as are Pop.With Nsync being a boy band we expect to see slightly different features during the video, compared to a solo artist or maybe a girl band.
Boy bands are mainly involved in the Pop Genre, (also known as popular music) consisting only of Male members. During the videos of Boy bands, the members can be expected to dance aswel as singing, the dance moves are usely highly choreographed performances. In most cases the audience do not tend to see the members of the band playing musical instruments.
Most of the videos espessially done by our groups band Nsync mainly have a narrative and performance aspect to them, telling a story through the lyrics and the video. In some cases boy bands can be put together by a producers through audtitions.

History of Boy bands
The earliest Boy band to occur was in the 19th century between the 1800's and the 1900's called Barbershop Quarters, they began as a group of males singing four different parts and harmonies. Then between 1940 and 1950 a rival " male vocal" group developed in the use of Doo-Wop music. Doo-Wop were predessesors of previous boy bands, they sung about topics which included love,and other common themes used in Pop Music.
The term Boy band was not used untill the late 1980's up untill then they were known as " male vocal groups".

During the 1960's the main Boy bands which occured were The Osmands, Jackson 5 and The Munkees. Jackson 5 were a family made band that helped establish many of the music conventions that boy bands follow, For example all the members sang which is a common convention of a Boyband, instead of having a ' front man' and having the rest of the backing using instruments. 


However you could say that in the modern day the common convention can be challanged as Nsync seem to have a lead singer in the form of Justin Timberlake.


In the 1990's boybands such as Take That, East 17, Boyzone, 911,Nsync and Backstreet Boys developed forming the Britpop genre. Then in 1997 there was a change to pop orinated groups such as Nsync and BackStreet Boys that boy bands became popular and exploded commercially, dominating the US Market.