One Direction Image (about)

Neil McCormick from The Daily Telegraph published an article on the nature of One Direction's success in North America. Noting that Americans had left a gap in the market stating that it took prominence of Justin Bieber to demonstrate that there was still a market for "clean cut, wholesome, middle class parent friendly pop: cute boys advocating puppy love. And what could be better than one cute boy, if not five?". One Direction are often labelled as the new British Invasion. Bill Werde, a representative of Billboard Magazine stated on the matter. "There's a lot of possibility here, there's a lot of upside, that level of talent with those kinds of looks, it's really a perfect storm for a massive, massive successful phenomenon." Sonny Takhar, the chief executive officer of Syco Music, attributes the breakthrough to the power of social media. "Sometimes you feel the song's the star, but it's not like that here - it's the act," he says. "It's a real moment. Social media has become the new radio, it's never broken an act globally like this before." Yahoo News published an article, that according to Google's keyword tool 3.35 million people are searching for One Direction related search phrases each month. Their management employs a social media team, the members all tweet themselves, which helps create the illusion that they couldn't be any closer to their fans. One Direction's Twitter account had amassed 2 million followers as of February 2012, and since then the account gains followers at an average of 35,000 per day. Each member is also known for their feature; Horan is the "cute little Irish one", Malik is the "quiet and mysterious one", Payne is "the sensible one", Styles is "the charming one" and Tomlinson is "the funny one."

Horan commented on One Direction as a boyband: "People think that a boyband is air-grabs and being dressed in all one colour. We're boys in a band. We’re trying to do something different from what people would think is the typical kind of boyband. We’re trying to do different kinds of music and we’re just trying to be ourselves, not squeaky clean."