EDIT: oh my, posted this in "artists & bands", should've been in the general Asian Music Chat area. I'm sorry, hopefully someone can move it
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I'm currently following a university course called "Youth, Family and Intergenerational Relationships in Japan", and I'm reading quite an interesting article about adolescence and teenagers in Japan. And by chance, I happened to have found an explanation of the huge success that boy-bands have! Take a look, just wanted to share this with anyone who's interested
Source: Merry Isaacs White - Taking Note of Teen Culture in Japan: Dear Diary, Dear Fieldworker
Discussions of consumer industries, especially those focused on youth, emphasize their control over their audience, their manipulations in extracting the pocket money of young innocents. Their research is indeed profit-driven and "applied," but it is thorough and accurate, as they need to know their market in great detail and because manufacturers spend large amounts of money on their youth-marketing manuals. Marketing think tanks engage in solidly empirical work and are quite open to learning from adolescents themselves. Preconceptions do not sell teen gear. They collect information of all kinds, from (of course) the amounts of ready cash young people have to less obvious data, such as how a thirteen-year-old feels about her mother, what a fifteen-year-old thinks the government should do about the environment while not neglecting how she feels about baring her midriff, and how many close friends she has.
One example of the use of such information by the highly interrelated pop-star industries came when I interviewed an editor at one of the leading pop-star magazines targeted to junior high school girls. He told me of the research they had conducted that showed girls of this age tending to form friendship groups consisting of about five to seven girls. This led the promotion agency to which their magazine was "affiliated" to seek out (and create) boy pop-star singing groups of this number. Their rationale was that if there were about the same number of boys in the idolized group as in the group of friends most important to a girl, then there would be harmonious adoration without competition: each one could idolize a different performer in the group. Their strategies, and the close and sensitive relationship between media and "manufacturers", seemed based on a nice use of applied social science.