The song was an immediate hit, eventually rising to the #1 spot on the
Billboard 200 and paving the way for her highly successful premier album of the same name,
…Baby One More Time, which has since gone on to move over 28 million units worldwide. Though undoubtedly a highly skilled singer, Britney Spears’ breakout success was due in part to an overtly-sexualized schoolgirl image that landed her a photo shoot for
Rolling Stone magazine at age 17, a source of some controversy - controversy that only fueled sales of
…Baby One More Time, which also spawned such hit singles as
"Sometimes" and
"(You Drive Me) Crazy".
Hot on the heels of her wildly successful debut, Britney released her sophomore album
Oops!…I Did it Again just 16 months later in May 2000.
Oops!… proved Britney’s initial success was no fluke, moving over 16 million copies and garnering considerable critical acclaim for tracks such as
"Lucky" and
"Stronger". After the release of
Oops!, Spears did it again a year later with the release of her third album, 2001’s
Britney, which like its predecessors immediately rose to the top of the Billboard 200 based on the success of singles like
"I’m a Slave 4 U" and
"I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman".
Following
Britney, Spears took a year off to rework her teen-pop sound into a more adult oriented club-friendly sound which would eventually begin to surface in her fourth album
In The Zone, which was released in 2003 after her unsuccessful movie debut in the teen flick
Crossroads and the breakup of her longtime relationship with fellow teen idol Justin Timberlake. Though
In The Zone was far from an unsuccessful album (producing hit singles like
"Toxic" and
"Everytime"), Britney’s music soon became less interesting than her wild roller-coaster of a personal life, which began to receive increased media scrutiny when she married unknown backup dancer
Kevin Federline just months after meeting him in October 2004.
Britney’s highly publicized relationship with Kevin Federline lasted almost two years, with the couple filing for
divorce in late 2006. Post-divorce, Britney began to attract attention for her wild and often erratic antics - including several stints in rehab, a misdemeanor hit-and-run, two 5150 involuntary psychiatric holds, and an incident in which she completely shaved her head at a beauty salon - which eventually led a California court to grant custody of the couple’s two children to Kevin, though the two have since reached a visitation agreement for Spears. The media circus surrounding Spears’ frenzied behavior throughout 2006 and 2007 overshadowed her fifth studio release, 2007’s
Blackout, which sold a somewhat disappointing 2 million copies. Currently, Britney is hard at work on her sixth and yet-unnamed studio album, which will probably see a 2009 release.