One Direction

One Direction are an English-Irish pop boy band based in London, consisting of Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. They signed with Simon Cowell's record label Syco Records after being formed and finishing third in the seventh series of the British televised singing competition The X Factor in 2010. Propelled to international success by the power of social media, One Direction's two albums Up All Night and Take Me Home, released in 2011 and 2012 respectively, broke several records, topped the charts of most major markets, and generated hit singles, which include "What Makes You Beautiful" and "Live While We're Young".

Often described as forming part of a new "British Invasion" in the United States, the group have sold 19 million singles and 10 million albums, according to the band's management company, Modest! Management. Their achievements include two BRIT Awards and three MTV Video Music Awards. According to Nick Gatfield, the chairman and chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment UK, One Direction represented a $50 million business empire by June 2012. They were proclaimed 2012's "Top New Artist" by Billboard. By April 2013, the band had an estimated personal combined wealth of £25m.

History==

The X Factor (2010–11)

In 2010, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson auditioned as solo candidates for the seventh series of the British televised singing competition The X Factor. They failed to progress to the "Boys" category at "judges' houses", and, after a suggestion by Nicole Scherzinger, a guest judge, they were put together to form a five-piece boy band at Wembley Arena, in London, England, in July 2010, during the "bootcamp" stage of the competition, thus qualifying for the "Groups" category. Subsequently, the group got together for two weeks to get to know each other and to practise. Styles came up with the name One Direction. For their qualifying song at "judges' houses", and their first song as a group, One Direction sang an acoustic version of "Torn". Simon Cowell later commented that the performance convinced him that the group "were confident, fun, like a gang of friends, and kind of fearless as well." Within the first four weeks of the live shows, they were Cowell's last act in the competition. The group quickly gained popularity in the UK.

One Direction finished in third place and immediately after the final, their song "Forever Young", which would have been released if they had won The X Factor, was leaked onto the internet. Shortly afterwards it was confirmed that One Direction had been signed by Cowell to a reported £2 million Syco Records record contract. Recording for their debut album began in January 2011, as they flew to Los Angeles to work with RedOne, a record producer. A book licensed by One Direction, One Direction: Forever Young (Our Official X Factor Story), was published by HarperCollins in February 2011, subsequently topping The Sunday Times Best Seller list. The same month, the boy band and other contestants from the series participated in the X Factor Live Tour. During the tour the group performed for 500,000 people throughout the UK. After the tour concluded in April 2011, the group continued working on their debut album. Recording took place in Stockholm, London and Los Angeles, as One Direction worked with producers Carl Falk, Savan Kotecha, Steve Mac, and Rami Yacoub, among others.

Up All Night (2011–12)

Released in September 2011, One Direction's debut single, "What Makes You Beautiful", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart, after becoming the most pre-ordered Sony Music Entertainment single in history. Subsequent singles, "Gotta Be You" and "One Thing", peaked in the UK Singles Chart top ten. In November 2011, they signed a record deal with Columbia Records in North America. Steve Barnett, the co-chairman of Columbia Records, said it was not a difficult decision to sign One Direction; "I just thought there was a void, and maybe they could seize and hold it." "What Makes You Beautiful" was released in the United States in February 2012, where it debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 28, becoming the highest debut for a British act since 1998. It has sold over 4 million copies in the US. Upon arrival in the US in February 2012, One Direction embarked on a radio promotion spree, as well as their first North American concert tour as an opening act for Big Time Rush. They made their first US television appearance on The Today Show, at theRockefeller Center; an estimated 15,000 fans descended on the plaza. Critically commended for its appeal to the teenage audience, One Direction's first studio album, Up All Night, was released globally in early 2012. It became the UK's fastest-selling debut album of 2011, and topped the charts in sixteen countries. The album bowed atop the USBillboard 200 chart, making One Direction the first British group in US chart history to enter at number one with their debut album. They were inducted into the Guinness World Recordsas a result. Up All Night also became the first album by a boy band to sell 500,000 digital copies in the US and, by August 2012, had sold over 3 million copies worldwide.

[1][2]One Direction performing on their Up All Night Tour, April 2012

In April 2012, an American band that went by the same name filed a trademark infringement lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, the US band had been using the name since 2009, recorded two albums and filed an application to register the trademark name in the US in February 2011. The US band said they were entitled to three times the profits made by the UK band, as well as compensatory damages in excess of US$1million. The lawsuit claimed that Syco and Sony Music "chose to ignore the plaintiff's rights and wilfully infringed them" after they realised in early 2011 that the two bands shared the same name. Syco Records subsequently counter-sued, suggesting the US group was trying to make money from One Direction's success and that the boy band was the first to use the name in US interstate commerce. TheBBC reported in September 2012 that the UK group won the legal dispute over the right to keep using their band name; the US band changed its name to Uncharted Shores. The change of name was announced in a joint statement that also noted both groups were happy with the outcome.

In December 2011, One Direction embarked on their first headlining UK concert tour, the Up All Night Tour. In early 2012, they announced Australasian and North American legs of the concert tour, with dates from April to July 2012. The tour, comprising 62 shows, was met with positivity both critically and commercially. A recording of a concert from the tour, Up All Night: The Live Tour, was released in May 2012. In addition to the DVD topping the charts in twenty-five countries, its global sales had exceeded 1 million copies by August 2012. One Direction's first book to be licensed in America, Dare to Dream: Life as One Direction, published in the United States in May 2012, topped The New York Times Best Seller list. In June 2012, Nick Gatfield, the chairman and chief executive officer of Sony Music Entertainment UK, stated how he expects One Direction to represent a $100 million business empire over 2013. Gatfield was quoted as saying, "What you might not know about One Direction is that they already represent a $50 million business and that's a figure we expect to double next year". In August 2012, the group's record sales exceeded 8 million singles, 3 million albums, and 1 million DVDs, and they performed "What Makes You Beautiful" at the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in London, which represented the handover to Rio de Janeiro as the host of the 2016 Summer Olympics. One Direction were the biggest winners of the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards winning their three nominations on 6 September 2012, including Best New Artist.

Take Me Home, This Is Us and Midnight Memories (2012–present)

[3][4]One Direction at red carpet of the Logie Awards of 2012 in Melbourne

One Direction's second studio album, Take Me Home, was released in November 2012. Take Me Home was written in groups and has an average of just under five songwriters per track. Savan Kotecha, Rami Yacoub, and Carl Falk, who composed One Direction's hits "What Makes You Beautiful" and "One Thing", spent six months in Stockholm developing songs for the album, and were able to shape melodies around their tones. One Direction began recording the album in May 2012, in Stockholm at Kinglet Studios. Take Me Home garnered mixed reviews from music critics. There was praise for its quality of production, while it was criticised for its generic, rushed nature.Its lead single, "Live While We're Young", released in September 2012, reached the top ten in almost every country it charted in and recorded the highest one-week opening sales figure for a song by a non-US artist in the US. The album and its second single, "Little Things", both debuted at number one in the UK simultaneously; something that One Direction became the youngest act in British chart history to achieve.Take Me Home sold 540,000 copies in its first week in the US, debuted atop the Billboard 200, and topped the charts in more than thirty-four other countries. Additionally, Up All Night and Take Me Home were the number three and number four best-selling albums of 2012 globally, selling 4.5 million and 4.4 million units, respectively.

One Direction performed "Little Things" at the 2012 Royal Variety Performance in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II, and headlined a sold-out show at New York City's Madison Square Garden on 3 December 2012. In February 2013, One Direction released a cover version of "One Way or Another" and "Teenage Kicks", "One Way or Another (Teenage Kicks)", as the 2013 Comic Relief single. In addition, the Official Charts Company revealed that One Direction have sold 2,425,000 records in the UK by February 2013. One Direction embarked on their second concert tour in February 2013, the Take Me Home Tour. The concert tour consists of over 100 shows in Europe, North America and Australasia. Ticket sales reached 300,000 within a day of release in the UK and Ireland, which included a six-date sell-out at London's The O2 Arena. In the Australian and New Zealand markets, tickets grossed US$15.7 million, with all 190,000 tickets being sold for the eighteen shows to be held. One Direction: This Is Us, a 3D film about the group directed by Morgan Spurlock and produced by Spurlock, Ben Winston, Adam Milano and Simon Cowell, was released by TriStar Pictures on 30 August 2013. The film features the song "Best Song Ever", released on 22 July 2013. "Best Song Ever" is slated to serve as the lead single of the group's upcoming third studio album. Their first stadium tour the Where We Are Tour is set to commence in April 2014. The boyband also announced that they will donate £200,000 of the tour's ticket sales to Stand Up to Cancer charity.

On 6 September 2013, Styles tweeted that the third studio album will be released on 25 November 2013 and will be titled Midnight Memories. The album was described by the band as edgier and as having a "slightly rockier tone" than their previous efforts.

Musical style

One Direction's debut studio album, Up All Night (2011), is predominantly a pop music record, containing elements of teen pop,dance-pop, pop rock, and power pop, with electropop and rock influences. Digital Spy's Robert Copsey described the album as a "collection of PG pop rock with killer choruses", while The New York Times considered it "full of easy rock-inflected pop, blithe and sometimes clever." Jason Lipshutz of Billboard acknowledged that the album demonstrates an originality in sound that was "necessary for the revitalization of the boy band movement". The songs "One Thing" and "What Makes You Beautiful" were particularly noted for the genres of power pop and pop rock, for their "powerhouse" guitar riffs and "forceful" choruses.

Their second studio album, Take Me Home (2012), is characterised by rock-inherited pop, prominent electric guitar riffs, brightsynthesizers, double entendres for sexual intercourse, a homogeneous sound and message, and the pitch-correcting softwareAuto-Tune. Alexis Petridis for The Guardian interpreted its signature sound as a "peppy, synth-bolstered take on early-80s new-wave pop, heavy on clipped rhythms and chugging guitars," which, he said, is at least an improvement on the substitute contemporary R&B "that was once the grim lot of the boyband." Jon Caramanica, writing in The New York Times, considered the album "far more mechanical" than their debut album, although noted that it is sonically and lyrically similar. The album's lyricism speaks of falling in love,unrequited love, the insistence that flaws are what make a person unique, commitment, jealousy and longing for past significant others.

Erica Futterman for Rolling Stone favoured their live acoustic performances as both showing, "Horan's ability to play guitar, as well as One Direction's admirable live vocals. There was no need to worry about a backing track or a bum note, a pleasant realization at a pop show." Herald Sun's Cameron Adams opined that One Direction have "strong pop voices".Melody Lau of the National Post wrote, "It's easy to get lost in inherent appeal of their perfectly coiffed dos and almost-too-put-together preppy style but somewhere in the midst of all the love-struck squeals of teenage girls are guys who can actually sing and, to a certain extent, entertain." Jane Stevenson of the portal site Canoe concurred: "What I didn't really prepare myself for was that they all can actually sing in concert." Chris Richards, writing in The Washington Post, dissented from the approval: "As the five traded couplets, it was tough to imagine a future Justin Timberlake, Ricky Martin or Bobby Brown emerging from the pack. No one voice stood out." Mike Wass of Idolator felt One Direction's "surprisingly accomplished effort" of Kings of Leon's "Use Somebody" proved that One Direction are "more than capable" of evolving their sound.

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[5][6]One Direction greet Swedish fans in Stockholm, May 2012

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, writing that it took the prominence of Justin Bieber to demonstrate that there was still a market for "clean cut, wholesome, whiter-than-white, middle class parent friendly pop: cute boys advocating puppy love. And what could be better than one cute boy, if not five?" One Direction have been described as sparking a resurgence in the interest in boy bands, and as forming part of a new "British Invasion" in the United States. 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."

Sonny Takhar, the chief executive officer 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 said. "It's a real moment. Social media has become the new radio, it's never broken an act globally like this before." Will Bloomfield, the group's manager, added, "These guys live online, and so do their fans." Their management employs a social media team and the members all tweet themselves, "which helps create the illusion that they couldn't be any closer to their fans," according to Caspar Llewellyn Smith, writing for The Guardian. One Direction's Twitter account had amassed 10 million followers by February 2013, with the account gaining followers at an average of 21,000 per day. Each member is known for his 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". Horan commented on One Direction as a boy band, "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." Leah Collins, writing for the National Post, remarked that One Direction had succeeded on the latter front,"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." Writing for The Observer, Kitty Empire opined, "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".

Members

Main article: List of One Direction members*Niall Horan

• Zayn Malik
• Liam Payne
• Harry Styles
• Louis Tomlinson

Discography

Main article: One Direction discography*Up All Night (2011)

• Take Me Home (2012)
• Midnight Memories (2013)

Concert tours

• Up All Night Tour (2011–12)
• Take Me Home Tour (2013)
• Where We Are Tour (2014)