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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?".^[92] One Direction have been described as sparking the resurgence in the boy band concept, and of forming part of a new "British Invasion" in the United States.^{[33][34][35][36][37]} Bill Werde, a representative of Billboard magazine commented. "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."^[93]

One Direction greet Swedish fans inStockholm, May 2012.

Sonny Takhar, the managing director of Syco Records, 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."^[93] Will Bloomfield the groups manager added, "These guys live online, and so do their fans." 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 4 million followers as of May 2012, with the account gaining followers at an average of 20,000 per day.^[94] Each member is known for their feature; Horan is "the cute one", Malik is "the quiet and mysterious one", Payne is "the sensible one", Styles is "the charming one" and Tomlinson is "the funny one".^[95]

Horan commented on One Direction as a boy band, saying: "People think that a boy band 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 boy band. We're trying to do different kinds of music and we're just trying to be ourselves, not squeaky clean."^[96]Leah Collins writing for The National Post remarked that One Direction had succeeded on the latter front. She writes, "For the most part, that just means the group presents themselves as typical, goofy and uncensored teenage boys — posting jokey YouTube videos, for instance, or boozing at awards shows."^[96] Writing for The Guardian, Kitty Empire opined, "Dance routines are fundamental to the boy band – or at least, to 90s Take That and late-00s JLS. One Direction fulfil a great many boy band prerequisites (looks, soppy lyrics, tune-grasp, fame-lust) but their lack of routines points to the subtle digressions afoot here."^[97] Jon Caramanica from The New York Times noted, "The story of boy bands is inevitably the story of disbandment", although he felt, "Given that the band has built some dissonance into its act, it may take a while for that to happen to One Direction."^[98]

^{- Alya Fadhila -}