Stereotypes in media representations of boy bands and their fans

Abstract

Boy bands have long been disparaged in music journalism, in part because of their association with teenage and prepubescent girls who are their primary fans. This study uses media stereotypes of musicians and their fans to see how the interplay of age and gender among these two constituencies is associated with negative stereotyping in music journalism. This study fills a gap in scholarship with a quantitative comparison of how modern boy bands and their fans are stereotypically portrayed compared to non-boy bands and their fanbases in a generalizable way. A content analysis of UK and U.S. music journalism from 2010 to 2015 finds that young women music fans continue to be stereotyped, and that boy bands are diminished through stereotypes that are gendered feminine, most prominently about their age and youth, authenticity of the music, and innocent sexuality. However, the boy bands were not diminished through feminine tropes more closely aligned with women fans, such as with the use of emotional language. Being young and male does not automatically mean marginalization and stereotyping, however – the young men in the non-boy bands were consistently referred to in non-stereotypical ways.