1993-Nick Carter
Brian Littrell
A. J. McLean
Howie Dorough
Kevin Richardson1993-2006, 2012-
According to Billboard, Backstreet Boys are the best-selling boy band of all time with 130 million records sold worldwide.
The band was formed in 1993 in Orlando, Florida. In 1998 the mayor presented the Backstreet Boys with the key to the city.
There are several rumors surrounding the name "Backstreet Boys." Some sources claim the name comes from a favorite restaurant in Orlando frequented by the band that member Brian discovered. Of course, the restaurant was called Backstreet. Others suggest that the name was taken from the Backstreet Flea Market, a popular teen hangout spot in Orlando.
One of Backstreet Boys' greatest hits is "
I Want It That Way." Large portions of the video for this song were recorded at Los Angeles International Airport, or LAX.
Of the five members, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nick Carter is the youngest. He was only 13 when the band formed in 1993.
While the Backstreet Boys have achieved great success and their albums have gone Platinum many times over, the first country where one of their records went Platinum was Germany.
The Backstreet Boys' first performance as a group was for nearly 3,000 people at SeaWorld in Orlando.
The members of Backstreet Boys come from different states. Kevin Richardson and Brian Littrell both hail from Lexington, Kentucky. Howie Dorough and A.J. McLean are Orlando, Florida natives and Nick Carter is from Jamestown, New York.
Howie D went to the same college as
*NSYNC member Chris Kirkpatrick. They both attended Valencia College in Orlando, Florida and sang together in its choir.
In 2006, it was discovered that Backstreet creator Lou Pearlman had perpetrated one of the largest and longest-running Ponzi schemes in American history, leaving more than $300 million in debt. In 2008 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, where he died in 2016.
AJ McLean asked his former neighbor Ryan Gosling to join the Backstreet Boys in their early days but he turned the opportunity down. When the group began to top the charts, the Drive star changed his mind, only for McLean to never return his call.
In 2003, Kevin Richardson joined the Broadway cast of Chicago with an acclaimed performance as lawyer Billy Flynn.
Brian Littrell is also a Christian pop singer. He released his debut solo album, Welcome Home, in 2006 and landed at #3 on the Christian Albums chart.
They joined forces with New Kids on the Block in 2011 on a joint world tour, billed as NKOTBSB. The tour, which spawned a compilation album of the same name, took in over $40 million.
They returned to the Hot 100 for the first time in nearly a decade when they featured on Florida Georgia Line's 2016 hit "
God, Your Mama, and Me." Brian Kelly and Tyler Hubbard of FGL are big fans of the group.
They launched their Las Vegas residency, Backstreet Boys: Larger Than Life, in March 2017. The city is a hotspot for their grown-up fans, who no longer have to rely on their parents to foot the bill for their Backstreet fix.
Nick Carter wisely turned down a chance to be a member of the Mickey Mouse Club in favor of becoming a Backstreet Boy. "They offered me a $50,000 contract," he told Entertainment Weekly. "But I wanted to do the Backstreet Boys."
When Backstreet Boys performed "I Want It That Way" on February 14, 2025 at SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, held at Radio City Music Hall, Brian Littrell's voice cracked badly. He'd been open about his struggles with a condition called vocal tension dysphonia, which makes it hard for him to control his voice, but this was the first time the symptoms showed in a nationally televised concert. Littrell said he first started having problems in 2012 when the group was on tour with NKOTB.
