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Date: Oct 01, 2099
Source: CBS
Submitted By: Jessica
We know the names of the stars that get teen-age girls screaming. Frank Sinatra could do it, and so could Elvis and the Beatles. And so can Lou Pearlman, it seems.
As 60 Minutes II Correspondent Vicki Mabrey reports, this 45-year-old native New Yorker has the recipe for creating teen sensations that get kids to part with their pocket money. So who is this supermogul with his finger on the pulse of young America?
Lou Pearlman knows what makes little girls scream. He is the force behind the band N’Sync, whose debut album has sold 7 million copies: That’s three times as many copies as rock 'n' roll legend Elvis Presley’s first album.
He is also a driving force behind the Backstreet Boys, whose recent 39-city tour sold out in less than an hour. And its latest album, Millennium, sold more copies in its first week than any other album. If you don’t recognize these groups, chances are you’re not part of Pearlman’s intended audience.
But when the fans are going crazy, what’s Pearlman doing? "Sitting back, taking it all in smiling because that’s exactly what I like to see happen," he says.
"I’m there because I want to make everybody happy. I like to see the artists happy. I like to see the fans happy. You know, of course, there’s a tinkle to the cash register, and everybody’s getting some financial happiness," Pearlman adds.
Actually it’s more like a flood to the cash register. Pearlman has created these sensations, many of them from scratch, and he banks on the fact that these young fans, once infatuated, will spend millions of dollars on everything from compact discs and concert tickets, to T shirts and posters. And if their allowance money won’t cover it, Pearlman calculates rightly that their parents will chip in.
A $30 T shirt here, a $15 disc there - these teenyboppers’ buying power is estimated at more than $100 billion per year.
And Pearlman is hoping to grab a chunk of that. An entrepreneur who backed into pop-mogul status just six years ago, he made his fortune in the aviation business. His path crossed with the music industry when he started outfitting luxury jets and leasing them to rock stars like Paul McCartney, Phil Collins and a young boy band called New Kids on the Block.
"I was invited to a concert. And I saw New Kids performing," Pearlman explains. "And it wasn’t hard for me to see the stage, because all the people they were like this big, so I sort of looked right over their heads. And I was able to see the stage; I saw everybody, and I was like amazed."
What amazed Pearlman was that the fans were buying every product the New Kids offered. Pearlman wanted a piece of that gold mine, so he set out to create his own teen idols.
Starting from scratch, and with the advice of some friends in the music business, he held auditions and eventually put together a group intended to drive young girls wild.
What was the winning formula? A young one, a cute one, a sensitive one, a jokester, a bad boy and the older hunk - all between the ages of 12 and 20. He then spent more than $1 million over the course of two years, training and molding them into what would become the Backstreet Boys.
At the time, grunge and gangsta rap were the rage, so Pearlman’s clean-cut, bubble-gum act didn’t interest MTV or the radio stations.
"I came out many times along the way, where people were telling me, 'Close your checkbook. Put it away. And don’t worry about it, because it’s not going to happen,'" he remembers.
"I saw all this hysteria wherever we went; it was always the same. And I figured if that’s happening, I can’t be wrong. I got to be onto something," he adds.
The Backstreet Boys caught on, racking up an estimated billion dollars in record sales alone. Pearlman heard the cash register ringing and figured if he could do it once, he could do it a dozen more times.
So on advice from singer Smokey Robinson, Pearlman set out to recreate the Motown model, with white kids singing pop instead of soul at a place that he calls "O-Town."
O-Town operates from an industrial park in Orlando, Fla., within an $8 million state-of-the-art facility where Pearlman basically grows his own bands, like the group Take 5.
Pearlman finds his raw material using talent scouts and word of mouth. There’s no need for open-casting calls. The kids then go through a combination boot camp and charm school, complete with vocal coaching, public relations training, image styling and choreography. Pearlman hires studio musicians for backup, the best producers in the business and well-known songwriters to craft instant hits.
All of this is tailored to what his market research tells him the fans will buy.
"We try to create that image and sound that we hope they like," he says. "We go out there and test market it."
Pearlman says the bands must have a clean look as well as a good look. The good look is to win the hearts of the kids, the clean look, to win the approval of the parents, and in the end, the wallets of both.
But being cute is not enough. Pearlman insists they all must have talent. Contrary to what the critics say, no lip-synching is allowed.
N’Sync fits the Pearlman profile perfectly, with teen magazines dubbing J.C. "the serious one," Lance "the ashy one," Chris "the prankster," Justin "the young, cute one," and Joey "the bad boy."
The members play along with those labels but bristle at any implication that the group is manufactured. They say the nucleus of N’Sync was formed before Pearlman’s charm school was even built.
"It wasn’t like people were trying to whip us or say, 'You need to do this,'" says Joey. "It’s just something that we wanted to do."
Adds Justin: "We were very lucky and very blessed of course. But we feel like, you know, that takes you so far."
"He definitely was there in the beginning, and he gave us the opportunities that, you know, a lot of people don't have," says Chris.
Still to the noninfatuated, N’Sync may seem strikingly similar to Pearlman’s other groups.
Pearlman continues to dig deep in his pockets to finance one group after the other. With several cute boy bands up and running, he’s started a girl group at O-Town called Innosense.
Then there’s LFO, whose single is at the top of the charts. It's supposed to stand out as the group with a harder edge. And now there’s a Latin band, C-Note, on the way. And Pearlman’s betting big money on fans liking all of them.
So far, none of his groups has bombed. Once they succeed, Pearlman starts to recoup the money he’s paid to support them, and he gets a hefty chunk of their profits. But not everyone is pleased with the setup.
After reaching unprecedented levels of success, the Backstreet Boys sued Pearlman. The group claimed he took too much of its money.
"The lawyers that got in the middle of it kind of blew it out of proportion in a sense," Pearlman says. "As time progressed, like in any situation, you want to get paid more when you deserve more. But there was a legal way to go about doing it."
The Backstreet Boys has severed ties with Pearlman’s company, Transcontinental, and found other management. The group refused to talk about the lawsuit or Pearlman.
But now there’s more trouble brewing in the O-Town family: N’Sync may be ready to bolt as well. It says its contract with Pearlman is up, and the group hints it may be leaving Transcontinental.
Says Lance of N'Sync: "When we first signed all the contracts and everything, we were so young, and we had no clue what we were doing."
Pearlman is not looking back, though. He’s had so many requests to turn his pop stars into movie stars that he figured he’d do that himself. He’s making a movie featuring his singers and using focus groups to tailor the script to young fans.
"Two little sayings you might want to put in there, which is something to go into the movie: 'You snooze you lose,' and, 'My way or the highway,'" says Pearlman.
He often refers to himself as the sixth Backstreet Boy, and in some circles, he is almost as famous as his young stars.
But if it all crashes tomorrow, and people want a whole different sound, what will Pearlman do?
"We had a lot of fun," he says. "And I’ll break my guitar out and try to see if I can start feeling that new sound. Hey, maybe I’ll get my time!"
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