Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift at Z-100 Jingle Ball 2012

The Z-100 Jingle Ball 2012 was not the apotheosis of the sublime or the terrifying, but only the massive as in British slang, as in, Massive thank you to Z-100!, a phrase the audience became accustomed to.

Chad Batka for The New York Times

Z-100 Jingle Ball 2012 Justin Bieber at Madison Square Garden on Friday. More Photos

Youve read about One Direction and the Wanted the Beatles and the Stones, it has been said, of English boy bands? That One Direction, drawn from the ranks of the British version of the television show The X-factor, has now had two albums enter the American Billboard album charts at No. 1? And that the Wanted was signed this year by Justin Biebers management?

Members of those bands were recently insulting each other on Twitter, and non-British people followed; theyve been partying with American celebrities. There were 11 acts playing brief sets across Fridays 220-minute concert at Madison Square Garden, the annual pageant for the New York Top-40 radio station Z-100, mightily organized and heavily branded. Nearly half of them came from Britain. It amounted to a statement: The teen pop business needs Britain massively.

One Direction, with bright smiles and uncoordinated body movements, started the night with its recent hit Live While Were Young. The song is a coy invitation to sex, but the music is pure intercontinental efficiency: clean, light, multiregional. (The band pantomimed a coordinated motion before Zayn Malik sang the line Were about to make some memories tonight: it was the canoe-paddling dance from the songs innocuous video.)

These next guys coming up are total sexual beasts! the Z-100 D.J. Elvis Duran gloated to prime the audience for the Wanted; no priming was needed. Its been characterized in Britain as a lad band, as opposed to a boy band; the songs unslyly reference drinking and fighting; the music moves further into the structure and sonics of European dance music and gives the northern-English accents of the band members Max George and Tom Parker more room to be heard. Still, theyre respecting the good-guy performative rules. They invited a young girl to dance with them onstage during Glad You Came, their biggest American hit yet by far, and one already used on! Glee!

Its not surprising that girls, and some boys, would know any song from Glee! It is surprising that theyd sing and scream throughout the performance by Ed Sheeran, the young English singer-songwriter who has helped write several songs for One Direction but hasnt yet had a high-charting single here. Hes the tender soul of the movement, with intense blue eyes and slept-in red hair. He played a child-size Martin guitar with a heavy thumb, getting a buzz and ring like a street musician. During his 10 minutes he sang The A Team, a sad and quiet song about homelessness referencing crack pipes and prostitution; the arena screamed nevertheless. An odd and perhaps prophetic moment.

Other Britons: Olly Murs, a former X-factor contestant with a can-do personality, slightly dandyish vibe and outdated early-90s pop sound; Cher Lloyd, the rapper-singer with the stage presence of a small woodland creature. Fun., from New York, sang their super-pop chanteys and anthems and went over well. Other Americans, less so. Jason Mraz played a friendly acoustic set, but you felt the more complicated Mr. Sheeran had already taken his parking place. Ne-Yo and B.o.B. performed hard, but seem to have peaked with this audience.

And Justin Bieber was the final act, sopping up the last of the scream power. After a rigorously choreographed beginning, he sat down to sing a few acoustic Christmas songs and seemed weighed down by gold chains, ego and his new muscles. His trawling for screams felt smug and unappealing. But he partly redeemed himself in communion with the audience during As Long as You Love Me, slightly dubstep, in which he started the nights greatest singalong, the wordless falsetto melody pitched perfectly to the vocal range of a preteenage girl.

Never mind all that: Taylor Swift was there. Her set several fathoms more elegant and sophisticated than anyone elses included a song with Mr. Sheeran, Everything Has Changed, which they wrote together. (There is eager speculation of a romantic link between Ms. Swift and Harry Styles of One Direction; between her social and working lives, she may be our truest transcontinental teen bridge.) She strode the stage in no hurry, clutching a red microphone, on a red-themed set, in front of plastic letters reading RED the name of her new album and also the shows smartest stage-set promotion. Her backup singers, nonvamping grown-up women, trailed her as she moved; there was a feeling of ownership when she played new and old songs including the recent We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together and screams of understanding rather than nervousness. The boss was in the house.