Britney Spears

Britney Jean Spears (born December 2, 1981) is an American singer. Referred to as the "Princess of Pop", she is widely regarded as one of the most culturally significant figures of the 21st century and is credited for helping revive the teen pop genre. Her energetic stage performances have brought both great success and initial controversy.

Spears developed an interest in music from an early age and began her professional career in 1992 as a cast member for the Ruthless! musical and the final two seasons of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club television series before signing with Jive Records in 1997. She debuted with the best-selling albums ...Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops!... I Did It Again (2000). The first album's lead-off single, "...Baby One More Time", reached number one in the US and became one of the best-selling singles in history. In 2001, Spears released her third album, Britney, one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century, and made her film debut that October in Longshot before co-starring in Crossroads the following year. Her next two albums, In the Zone and Blackout, were released in 2003 and 2007, respectively. The former included the single "Toxic", which won the Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Recording.

Facing lifelong public scrutiny and struggles with mental illness, Spears was placed under a controversial conservatorship in 2008, during which she recorded Circus that year, followed by Femme Fatale (2011) for Jive, and then Britney Jean (2013) and Glory (2016) for RCA Records. By the late 2010s, she had performed on more than two dozen US Top 40 songs, including the number-ones "Womanizer" (2008), "3" (2009), and "Hold It Against Me" (2011). In 2019, Spears withdrew from regular concert touring to focus on her conservatorship case, leading to the #FreeBritney movement and the 2021 documentary Framing Britney Spears. Also in 2021, the conservatorship was dissolved after she publicly testified against her family and management for maltreatment. Her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, debuted atop The New York Times Best Seller list.

With over 150 million records sold worldwide, Spears is one of the best-selling music artists in history, with Nielsen SoundScan ranking her the fourth best-selling female album artist of their era. Forbes listed her as the world's highest-paid female musician twice, in 2000 and 2012. Spears has received numerous industry awards, including one Grammy Award, six MTV Video Music Awards, and seven Billboard Music Awards (including the Millennium Award). Outside of music, Spears has launched numerous products over the years, with her 2005 fragrance Fantasy with Elizabeth Arden, Inc. generating over $1.5 billion in sales by 2011.

Life and career

1981–1997: Early life, family, and career beginnings

Britney Jean Spears was born in McComb, Mississippi, the second child of Lynne Irene (née Bridges) and James "Jamie" Parnell Spears. Her maternal grandmother, Lillian Portell, was English and born in London, and one of Spears's maternal great-grandfathers was Maltese. She spent her formative years with her siblings Bryan and Jamie Lynn and their parents in Kentwood, Louisiana.

Born in the Bible Belt, where socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a particularly strong religious influence, she was baptized as a Southern Baptist and sang in a church choir as a child. As an adult, she studied Kabbalist teachings. On August 5, 2021, Spears announced that she had converted to Catholicism. Her mother and sister are also Catholic. However, in September 2022, after Spears's ex-husband, Kevin Federline, and youngest son did an interview defending her father's actions during her conservatorship, she stated: "I don't believe in God anymore because of the way my children and my family have treated me. There is nothing to believe in anymore. I'm an atheist y'all."

In 1984, Spears began attending dance lessons in Kentwood and was selected to perform as a solo artist at the annual recital. Not long after, she sang "What Child Is This?" at her kindergarten graduation. During her childhood, she also had gymnastics and voice lessons and won many state-level competitions and children's talent shows. In gymnastics, Spears attended Béla Károlyi's training camp. She said of her ambition as a child, "I was in my own world [...] I found out what I'm supposed to do at an early age".

When Spears was eight, she and Lynne traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, to audition for the 1990s revival of The Mickey Mouse Club. Casting director Matt Casella rejected her as too young but introduced her to Nancy Carson, a New York City talent agent. Carson was impressed with Spears's singing and suggested enrolling her at the Professional Performing Arts School.

Spears was hired for her first professional role as the understudy for the lead role of Tina Denmark in the off-Broadway musical Ruthless!. She also appeared as a contestant on the popular television show Star Search and was cast in several commercials. In December 1992, she appeared in The All-New Mickey Mouse Club. Fellow cast members included Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling, Keri Russell, and JC Chasez. After the show's 1994 cancellation, she returned to Mississippi and enrolled at McComb's Parklane Academy. Although she made friends with most of her classmates, she compared the school to "the opening scene in Clueless with all the cliques. [...] I was so bored. I was the point guard on the basketball team. I had my boyfriend, and I went to homecoming and Christmas formal. But I wanted more."

In June 1997, Spears negotiated with manager Lou Pearlman to join the female pop group Innosense. Lynne asked family friend and entertainment lawyer Larry Rudolph for his opinion and submitted a tape of Spears singing over a Whitney Houston karaoke song along with some pictures. Rudolph decided that he wanted to pitch her to record labels, for which she needed a professional demo. He sent Spears an unused song of Toni Braxton; she rehearsed for a week and recorded her vocals in a studio. Spears traveled to New York with the demo and met with executives from four labels, returning to Kentwood the same day. Three of the labels rejected her, saying that audiences wanted pop bands such as the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls, and "there wasn't going to be another Madonna, another Debbie Gibson, or another Tiffany".

Two weeks later, executives from Jive Records returned calls to Rudolph. Senior vice president of A&R Jeff Fenster said about Spears's audition that "it's very rare to hear someone that age who can deliver emotional content and commercial appeal [...] For any artist, the motivation—the 'eye of the tiger'—is extremely important. And Britney had that." Spears sang Houston's "I Have Nothing" (1992) for the executives and was subsequently signed to the label. They assigned her to work with producer Eric Foster White for a month; he reportedly shaped her voice from a "lower and less poppy" delivery to "distinctively, unmistakably Britney". After hearing the recorded material, president Clive Calder ordered a full album. Spears had originally envisioned "Sheryl Crow music, but younger; more adult contemporary". She felt secure with her label's appointment of producers, since "[i]t made more sense to go pop, because I can dance to it—it's more me." She flew to Cheiron Studios in Stockholm, Sweden, where half of the album was recorded from March to April 1998, with producers Max Martin, Denniz Pop, and Rami Yacoub, among others.

1998–2000: ...Baby One More Time and Oops!... I Did It Again

After returning to the US, Spears toured shopping malls as part of her L'Oreal Hair Zone Mall Tour to promote her upcoming debut album. Her show was a four-song set, and she was accompanied by two backup dancers. Her first concert tour followed, as an opening act for NSYNC. Jive released her debut album ...Baby One More Time in January 1999. It debuted at number one on Billboard 200 and was certified two-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) after a month. The album topped the charts in fifteen countries and sold over 10 million copies in a year. It became the biggest-selling album ever by a teenage artist.