After 14 years and 44 million musical units sold, Irish manband Westlife have announced they are to split up, following the release of a Greatest Hits album and a 2012 tour. Having released a statement reassuring fans that the decision to part ways is “entirely amicable”, it seems that Westlife’s demise will be as calm and calculated as their career. But what will we have lost?

Westlife’s record and concert ticket sales were indeed staggering but their musical contribution was negligible. They will be remembered in the same way the Bay City Rollers aren’t. They only mattered to whom they mattered.

Let's be clear, Westlife weren't worthless because they didn't write the majority of their own material (an argument that's never held any weight in 75 years of popular music). Neither does their manufactured origin diminish them, or that their music and live performances conformed to a rigidly enforced formula. Such is the stuff that great pop is made of too.

Westlife's almost total irrelevance to the past, present and future of music is entirely down to the fact they were boring; the one thing pop must never be.

Westlife didn't even have a gimmick (once they lost the big dopey one). They even stopped doing the sitting on stools then standing up for the key change thing, once people remarked on it. At least the trial run of Boyzone was absurd, and managed a few charmingly misaimed lunges at the Take That crown before they were eclipsed by Ronan's desire to honk his way onto every Mother's Day compilation for a decade. But Westlife began their career with all the edges buffed off. Nothing interesting could happen because nothing interesting was risked.

If Westlife have a legacy then it's in the decision making process of Simon Cowell. The band's endurance is almost completely due to his unwavering hand on the Westlife rudder. It's rumoured that when the band exerted an element of creative control by opting to release the relatively upbeat Bop Bop Baby and Hey Whatever, both of which stalled in the lower half of the Top Five, Cowell called them into his office and handed them their next single: a cover of Barry Manilow's Mandy. It's said the word "shit" was uttered in a defeated Irish brogue, as they reluctantly accepted the return to balladville. Mandy took Westlife back to number one. Natch.

That millions of people will be sad to see them go, we don't deny. Whenever you follow a band, no matter how woefully dull, there's an excitement in the ritual of buying that band’s records and seeing them live - a connection to something transcendent of the everyday, a feeling of belonging to a club of the likeminded and an escapist thrill in collective worship and personal fanaticism.

But what will be missed is merely the pastime of being a Westlife fan. The music, in all its unremarkability, will live on in other unugly, unthreatening, unimaginative collectives of men with ruffled hair and chins to make you go weak at the knees. It's all good, clean, harmless, highly lucrative fun. And we wouldn't mind betting the reunion is already in the calendar for 2022.