Billboard Goes Teen Pop Crazy With The Wanted, One Direction Covers

Nothing is safe from the British Boy Band Invasion of 2012 -- not even the cover of weekly music biz bible Billboard. The publication designed their latest cover like an issue of teen-friendly mags like Bop or Tiger Beat, with its bright colors and philosophical musings about things like how well YouTube kisses. 

While the covers are cute riffs on that type of media, the trade mag cannot deny or ignore the impact that the Wanted and One Direction and have on the music industry. It's been a while since Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync and 98 Degrees ruled the charts during the last boy band explosion. Now is the right time for a resurgence of boy bands, since pop music ebbs and flows in algorithmic ways. Put simply, the boy band number was up.

The mag points out that the recent wave of solo females -- Katy, Gaga, Rihanna, Beyonce -- is being punctuated by the boys, due to market demand. There's plenty of teenage females who need a favorite band comprised entirely of cute boys.

Simon Cowell, who put One Direction together on the British edition of 'X Factor,' weighed in, saying,
"I've done this long enough that everything in music and entertainment in cyclical. [Even if] you go back to the Motown days, every time, it always comes back to 12 o'clock. It felt like that time again."

It's certainly that time for One Direction and the Wanted, with the latter notching a platinum single and the former debuting at No. 1.