Netflix will soon launch a new documentary series titled Dirty Pop: The Boyband Scam. New production delves into the rise and fall of the talent manager Lou Pearlmanknown for his role in creating and exploiting some of the most iconic boy bands of the 1990s, such as the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. According to the announcement on its official Twitter account, the series will be available on the platform on July 24.
Pearlman was an American talent manager who created and developed pop groups such as those already mentioned and other men’s groups such as O-Town. However, what many did not know is that the author used the names of these groups to attract people to a scheme ponzi of large magnitude, which defrauded investors of massive amounts of money. For this, Pearlman was sentenced to 25 years in prison after stealing more than $300 million.
In an interview with Guardian, NSYNC member Lance Bass detailed the moment he became aware of Pearlman’s financial irregularities. Bass revealed that the group was paid with only 35 dollars a day and, after three years, at a dinner in 1998, each member received only $10,000 for all their accumulated work.
Bass explained his reactions like this: “That’s when I knew we were being exploited, there was something wrong. “We immediately started calling lawyers.” The group managed to annul their contracts, which marked the beginning of the end of the former manager’s financial structure in a chapter that would go down in the dark side of music history.
The tweet of Netflix describes the project as follows: “The docuseries tracks the rise and fall of Lou Pearlman, the music mogul who created and exploited some of the biggest boy bands of the ’90s, including Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC and O-Town.” . While few details are known about the exact angle and focus of the docu-series, this teaser offers a glimpse of what viewers can expect.
For audiences eager to learn more about Pearlman’s criminal activities, this is not the first documentary to explore his frauds. The Boy Band Featuring: The Lou Pearlman Story, directed by Aaron Kunkel, which premiered on March 13, 2019, also examines the rise and fall of this influential pop mogul. The film has a respectable 81% score on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer and was well received by audiences and true-crime fans around the world.
Lou Pearlman’s career in the music industry began in the early 1990s, and he quickly gained notoriety for his ability to form boy groups that would become global phenomena. However, behind the façade of success and glamour, the alleged manager carried out a complex Ponzi scheme that worked for more than two decades before being dismantled.
Lou’s Ponzi scheme involved promoting fake investment opportunities through the Trans Continental Airlines corporation, a company pretending to be in the aviation business. The collapse of this method had significant consequences for the artists he had managed and for the hundreds of investors who lost large sums of money, ending with Pearlman being arrested in 2007 and convicted in 2008.
A ponzi scheme is a pyramid scam which pays profits to previous investors with funds from new investors, making them believe that the profits come from legitimate business activities. This type of scam can continue as long as there are new contributions and investors do not demand full refunds, believing in non-existent assets.
The first recorded incidents occurred between 1869 and 1872 with Adele Spitzeder in Germany, Sarah Howe in the United States in the 1880s, and Baldomera Larra Wetoret in Spain in 1875. The scheme was popularized in the 1920s with Carlo Ponziwho attracted large sums of money through postal coupon arbitrage, diverting funds to pay previous investors and himself, achieving great media notoriety.
