One Direction

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• Top 6 Boy Bands of All Time

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• Backstreet Boys

  Backstreet Boys, assembled in Orlando by manager Lou Pearlman in 1993, became the best-selling boy band in music history, and their 1999 album Millennium sold more than a million copies in its first week alone, reflecting the massive commercial scale of the late-1990s boy band phenomenon at its absolute peak. The group's tightly choreographed performances and harmonized vocal arrangements, combined with Pearlman's aggressive marketing and touring strategy, established much of the commercial and promotional template that subsequent boy bands, including groups Pearlman himself later assembled, continued to follow. Pearlman's management of both Backstreet Boys and their chief commercial rival NSYNC simultaneously, along with his later conviction for orchestrating one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history, added significant behind-the-scenes controversy to the broader late-1990s boy band industry's business practices. The group's sustained global commercial success, including massive sales specifically in international markets beyond the United States, made Backstreet Boys one of the most commercially dominant American music acts of the late 1990s, and their continued touring decades later reflects enduring fan loyalty built during that peak era.

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• NSYNC

  NSYNC's 2000 album No Strings Attached sold more than 2.4 million copies in its first week, a record for fastest-selling album in US history at the time, reflecting the group's position as Backstreet Boys' chief commercial rival during the peak of the late-1990s boy band era. The group's name referenced founding member Justin Timberlake's mother's observation that the members' voices came together "in sync," and Timberlake's subsequent solo career, becoming one of the most commercially and critically successful former boy band members in music history, significantly extended NSYNC's broader cultural legacy. Like Backstreet Boys, NSYNC was managed early in their career by Lou Pearlman, and the group's later lawsuit against Pearlman over disputed royalties and management fees became part of a broader pattern of legal disputes between Pearlman and the boy bands he'd assembled and managed. NSYNC's combination of massive commercial success during their active years and Timberlake's subsequent superstar solo career has made the group one of the most commercially and culturally significant acts of the late-1990s and early-2000s boy band era.

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• New Kids on the Block

  New Kids on the Block, formed in Boston in 1984, are widely credited with establishing the modern boy band commercial template during the late 1980s and early '90s, predating the massive Backstreet Boys and NSYNC-driven boy band boom by nearly a decade. Their combination of choreographed dance routines, coordinated harmonized vocals, and heavily marketed teen-idol imagery established much of the commercial and promotional playbook that subsequent boy bands, including the acts that later dwarfed their own sales figures, directly built upon. The group's massive early-1990s commercial success, including extensive merchandising and a dedicated animated television series, made them one of the first music acts to achieve that specific scale of multimedia teen-idol commercial branding beyond music sales alone. New Kids on the Block's 2008 reunion and subsequent continued touring, including joint tours with later boy band generations like Backstreet Boys, reflected the group's foundational historical significance to the broader boy band genre they helped originate, even as their commercial peak predated the genre's later, even larger 1990s explosion.

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• Boyz II Men

  Boyz II Men, formed at Philadelphia's High School for Creative and Performing Arts in 1988, distinguished themselves from more pop-oriented boy bands through their R&B and soul-influenced vocal harmony style, drawing more directly on doo-wop and traditional R&B vocal group traditions. Their 1994 single "I'll Make Love to You" spent 14 consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, and the group's combined chart-topping singles across the 1990s made them one of the most commercially dominant vocal groups of the decade, with a total of Billboard number-one hits that placed them among music history's most successful acts. The group's harmonically sophisticated a cappella vocal arrangements, showcased in performances without instrumental backing, demonstrated a level of pure vocal technical skill that distinguished Boyz II Men from boy bands more reliant on choreography and production than vocal harmony craft alone. Their combination of genuine R&B vocal group tradition and massive mainstream pop chart success has made Boyz II Men one of the most critically respected and commercially successful vocal groups in the broader boy band and R&B landscape of the 1990s.

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• Jackson 5

  The Jackson 5, formed by brothers from Gary, Indiana in the mid-1960s, became Motown Records' most successful group act of the early 1970s, and their first four singles all reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, an unprecedented achievement for a new act at the time. The group featured a young Michael Jackson as lead vocalist, and his precocious vocal talent and performance ability, evident from his earliest recordings as a preteen, made him one of the most celebrated child performers in popular music history well before his eventual solo superstardom. Their father Joseph Jackson's intensely demanding management and rehearsal regimen, which Michael and his siblings later described as abusive in various interviews and memoirs, has become a significant and complicated part of the group's broader historical legacy alongside their musical success. The Jackson 5's combination of genuine vocal group harmony tradition and Michael Jackson's individual star power established much of the family-group commercial template that influenced numerous subsequent sibling and family-based pop acts, and their catalog remains foundational to both Motown's history and the broader development of boy band and family vocal group traditions.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.