Pearlman, whether accidentally or on purpose, created the Beatles vs. While the two boy bands worked together to fight for the money that was stolen from them, the fans fueled a rivalry. While such legal battles would slow most artists down, by 2000, both groups were at the head of an international pop phenomenon. During the following few years, both boy bands would end up entangled in lawsuits with Pearlman, claiming misrepresentation and fraud over their lack of earnings. And, obviously, it’s caused a problem.”īackstreet Boys ended up leaving Wright’s Backstreet Management that fall. “With ‘N Sync at Number Three in this country, I think we’ve done that. “The ultimate goal was to do it not once but twice,” Wright said in 1998.
debut would finally hit Number Two in October of that year, spurred on by an MTV concert special in July that sent singles like “I Want You Back” and “(God Must Have Spent) a Little More Time on You” rising up the charts. But the market was starting to make space for a second boy band: ‘N Sync’s U.S. While not yet the phenomenon they would become with 1999’s Millennium, they did make it to Number Four with their self-titled U.S.
#Insync band cracked#
Prior to ‘N Sync‘s 1998 release, Backstreet Boys had just cracked the code. They trimmed the original track list – which included an a cappella cover of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” – but it’s still an album washed in the EuroDance sound favored by their camp of Swedish songwriters and producers.
#Insync band full#
– a full year after it was released in European markets. It wasn’t until March of 1998 that the group officially dropped their self-titled debut album in the U.S. They began releasing singles in Germany in 1996 and became megastars across the continent seemingly overnight. Like BSB, ‘N Sync launched in Europe first. “I guess you could say Backstreet Boys are the Temptations and ‘N Sync are the Four Tops,” he elaborated. Wright had once been NKOTB’s road manager and was brought on to work with Pearlman’s budding stars. “ used to joke all the time that we were going to turn Orlando into the next Motown, but we were going to call it Snowtown – because we weren’t doing it with R&B acts, we were doing it with pop acts,” ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys manager Johnny Wright told Rolling Stone in 1998. Just as BSB began breaking internationally, however, Pearlman did something unexpected: He created his own boy band’s stiffest competition. He placed an ad in the Orlando Sentinel for vocalists to form a pop group, leading to the founding of Backstreet Boys in 1993. Eighties heartthrobs New Kids on the Block were rocked with post–Milli Vanilli lip-sync allegations, and even grunge was on the way out, as drug-fueled turmoil led to the loss of the genre’s biggest star.īut Pearlman, a man with a history of insurance fraud, was inspired by the NKOTB model. In the mid-Nineties, there was an absence of big-name pop groups marketed to teens. “Then you find out, ‘Well, actually there is somebody like you.'” “When we started out, we were like, ‘Yeah, we’re a team. “It was almost like a betrayal,” Kevin Richardson recalled in the doc, looking back at the moment in 1995 when the Boys’ founder and label CEO Lou Pearlman showed Richardson a VHS recording of the newly formed ‘N Sync showcasing their abilities.
In the 2015 Backstreet Boys documentary Show ‘Em What You’re Made Of, a single telling scene sums up the strange tension that arose between two of the biggest-selling boy bands of all time.
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