Repetitive use of Boy bands/girl bands as a cultural commodity

Over the last twenty to thirty years there has been an increasing number of pop bands emerging within the music industry which has created a repetitive string of similar bands. In order to circumvent the repetitive nature of pop bands the music industry modifies each pop band to create a small but noticeable difference in order to create a sense of distinction between bands.  Within the culture industry Adorno and Horkheimer discuss their concept of the "Pseudo Individual" which is concerned with; the lack of originality amongst cultural products consumed by the masses and the use of minor modifications to cultural products to create a false sense of individuality. (Adorno and Horkheimer,1999) The lost of the individual is developed through the mass production of cultural products which bear only minor differences to the cultural masses. When contrasting the concept of the "Pseudo Individual" to pop bands within the music industry we are able to distinguish pop bands that have been seamlessly reproduced by  the music industry. By using the pop bands; the Backstreet Boys, One Direction, the Spice Girls, and the PussyCat Dolls as examples of how the music industry reproduces pop bands we can see how each band displays their own "pseudo individuality" in order to differentiate themselves from other strikingly similar pop bands. To first look at the Backstreet boys and One Direction we can view a number of similar attributes across the board: pop genre based, five member groups, selling of band memorabilia, as well as each displaying a separate but collective identity to round out the group. When applying these attributes to the girl pop bands the Spice Girls and the Pussycat Dolls it turns out to be an identical match. The modification of each group comes from each  individual group members identity within the group for example the Spice Girls were built around identities such as "sporty-spice" and "posh-spice". It is at this point where Adorno & Horkheimer's concept of the "pseudo individual" emerges, by applying individual identities to each member of a pop group this creates according to Adorno & Horkheimer a "difference that can only be measured in millimeters". (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1999) These minor modifications of identity do not create an individual they create a false identity to distract the consumers from the fact that these pop bands exhibit many signs of basic cultural reproduction.

The links below are fan websites and youtube links to show the similarities between each pop band:
The Backstreet Boys: http://www.backstreetboys.com/
One Direction: http://www.backstreetboys.com/
The Spice Girls: http://www.spicegirls.co.uk/indexuk.htm
The Pussycat Dolls: http://www.pussycat-dolls.net/