Do you think there is a gap in the market?

[Easty]

A gap for pop. There are no decent pop bands around. The whole childrens market seems to be consumed by Busted and Mcfly. Do you think there is a gap for a pop band like S CLub 8? Or is there no longer a market for pop?

[Sybil]

There is definitely still something of a market for good pop IMO. But being"credible" and "cool" is maybe too important at the moment

But these things so in cycles, and I think (hope) the market will grow again sometime soon. Then we should have loads and loads of uncool stuff again. Hooray.

[DansiB]

Easty said:

A gap for pop. There are no decent pop bands around. The whole childrens market seems to be consumed by Busted and Mcfly. Do you think there is a gap for a pop band like S CLub 8? Or is there no longer a market for pop?

I think good pop bands were given decent and respectable sales and chart positions until guitar bopping not knowing anything teenies came onto the scene.

I don't think there's a chance now.

[Admin]

I think pop is on the way out and hopefully indie can muscle it's way back in, we shall see...

[-Big Dan-]

I never think of pop as a genre though. As far as I knew, it was simply an abbreviation for 'popular'. So even if indie does muscle its way back in, it'd still be classed as pop, as far as I'm concerned anyway.

[Panda]

There isn't a gap in the market at the moment, there's just not enough room for it.

The public, by and large, are sick of it, having been force-fed boy bands and girl groups non-stop for over a decade, with the reality TV shows taking this to new levels. Rock/Indie is in at the moment. Even the more successful pop acts at the moment are playing guitars.

We experienced the same thing in the mid 90s so the cycle will probably repeat itself. Pop will take over again, but it might not be for a while, and when it does happen it will take something special. The Spice Girls kicked everything off last time, but since then we've had endless Spice Girl rip-offs, so it will take something more original...

[Earl Purple]

The Spice Girls didn't kick it off, if anything it was started by Stock Aitken Waterman around 1987 and shortly after with the emergence of Bros and New Kids On The Block.

Bros were actually the first in the run of boy-bands, shortly followed by Brother Beyond though New Kids were the next "king" of boybands, then Take That took over. When Take That split, Boyzone took command. They had already been there, but had no #1s at all until after Take That split. They were subsequently replaced by Westlife, and now Busted are the main boy-band.

There has always been one leading boyband, although there have been times when there are also others around. There was a small gap, perhaps, between the end of the New Kids reign and the start of Take That, in the years 1991-92.

Manufactured pop lived happily alongside rock (commonly called indie but not necessarily) and dance and R&B/rap during the 1990s. But in 1998, rock took a downward turn, caused by many things - firstly the absence of both Blur and Oasis that year, secondly that other Britpop favourites like Pulp decided to go less commercial. New bands like Ultrasound emerged that year but had limited success, and for many it was hard to get a record deal, hard to understand why as "britpop" artists had sold far more albums than the manufactured pop ones when both were successful (The Spice Girls sold a lot of singles, and their albums reached #1 but were outsold by Oasis etc). I think a lot of that is because the artists wanted a higher share of the profits, and the record companies like manufactured pop because often it's the label owners who write the songs so get more royalties, and they can often dump the artists much more easily, plus control their direction.

[Panda]

Earl said:

The Spice Girls didn't kick it off, if anything it was started by Stock Aitken Waterman around 1987 and shortly after with the emergence of Bros and New Kids On The Block.

I meant the Spice Girls kicked off the last cycle. Things had become pretty quiet before then, after the demise of the Stock, Aitken & Waterman acts, Bros and NKOTB, and the rise of Britpop, as well as dance music reaching unprecedented levels of popularity. Take That were pretty much on their own. Apart from them, there weren't too many pop acts around between 1992 and 1995. East 17 never had the same degree of popularity, and their music often wasn't typical of a boy band. Boyzone only had a #1, as you say, after Take That had split, but also after the Spice Girls had arrived...

[Panda]

Earl said:

But in 1998, rock took a downward turn, caused by many things - firstly the absence of both Blur and Oasis that year, secondly that other Britpop favourites like Pulp decided to go less commercial.

Be Here Now killed Britpop. It was all downhill from there...

[Earl Purple]

What killed britpop was the media (and possibly the record companies?)

Great bands like Astrid and Ooberman were shunned with comments like "britpop has finished..."