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There is no greater cultural crime a young girl can commit than loving pop music without apology. Forever marginalized as the screaming, crying Beatlemaniac, Directioner, or Swiftie, teen girl fandom in 2015 is more powerful and worthy of our respect than ever. Blogs, fan forums, and other online communities are havens for fans to dissect every tweet and performance their idols offer up, and these spaces are often ruled by teen girls. They worship collectively, exalt in mutual understanding, and celebrate both the bands they adore and one another. In fan-dominated spaces, teen girls are the ultimate authorities.

But their power has an expiration date, because pop artists earn respect only when they stop appealing to a teen demographic. Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé are two of the most prominent faces of this, prancing proof of the idea that there’s a legitimacy and longevity awaiting pop artists when they trade their Teen Choice Awards for Grammys. It's an idea that is now so prevalent that we’ve begun predicting who, in new pop groups, will be the one to "pull a Timberlake" and leave the group behind for respectable success. The boy bands and girl groups—not to mention their passionate supporters—that made these artists famous are seemingly only of value when they act as stepping stones to the next, better group of appreciative listeners. Drop the chaste pop songs about unrequited love and hand-holding, they’re taught, and they’ll move on to the right kind of fans: adults, men. That is how one becomes an artist, right?

-=-=-=-It’s great that Taylor Swift’s fifth album, 1989, unleashed her upon a new, unsuspecting audience, that it proved so popular with previously Swift-averse adult listeners and provided "SNL" with fodder about the identity crisis serious music listeners experienced when they caught themselves enjoying it after years of dismissing her output. But the girls who’ve spent a decade hanging off Swift’s every word, charting her emotional growth and lyrical progression in McSweeney’s and zines and Tumblr blogs weren’t waiting for that approval. They didn’t need permission from a critic’s begrudgingly positive review of the album to start taking Taylor seriously; they’ve done so from the start.

Pop music is fundamentally about the fans, and when we say things like "fame begets fawning praise" we’re missing a big addendum: it does, except when young female fanbases are the ones stoking the ascent. When fame is girded by a swelling teenage, female fanbase immediately, that celebrity becomes false, temporary, and unearned. We’re always grappling for a reason to disregard the value of a popular—and populist—product because blindly embracing it means the market research and Simon Cowell-eque figures behind it have duped us again. The presence of teen girls offers up a handy barometer: if they like something you can be rest assured it’s not worth a serious listener’s ear.

A year before they toured in support of the Rolling Stones, the funk-influenced Manchester pop band the 1975 weren’t even filling pubs in their hometown. And while eventual and important blessings from gatekeepers like Zane Lowe and the Guardian propelled them beyond the minor leagues, it wasn’t critical co-signs that sold out their shows at the Royal Albert Hall in a span of minutes. It was the band’s dedicated legion of young female fans that carried the 1975 from local also-rans to festival mainstays, with more sold out international tours under their belt than they have albums to their name.

Despite the passion and dedication of his band’s supporters, the 1975 frontman Matthew Healy treads carefully when addressing the matter of their mercurial rise, and just who it is that made them. "What qualifies a boy band, though? If it’s hysteria and a female-led population of fans and being surrounded in hotels by those fans and doing sell-out shows, then we’re a boy band," he said last year. He’s since distanced his band from that designation; female fans are seen as less legitimate, so their adoration is an instant credibility-killer.