Britney Spears

Britney Spears, born Britney Jean Spears on December 2, 1981, in McComb, Mississippi, is an American singer-songwriter, businessperson, record producer, songwriter, public figure, actor, and musician. She is known for her work in pop music, electropop, dance-pop, teen pop, synth-pop, electronic dance music, and techno. Britney Spears is often referred to as the "Princess of Pop".

Spears was educated at Parklane Academy, Professional Performing Arts School, and Amur State Medical Academy. She is the daughter of James G. Spears and Lynne Spears, and has a sister named Jamie Lynn Spears.

Some of Britney Spears' notable works include "Toxic!", "Gimme More", "Baby One More Time", "Oops!... I Did It Again", and "Work Bitch". She has received numerous awards throughout her career, such as Grammy Awards, American Music Awards, Bambi Awards, Billboard.com Mid-Year Music Awards, Billboard Music Awards, MTV Europe Music Awards, and MTV Video Music Awards.

Britney Spears currently resides in Los Angeles and holds United States citizenship. She has two children and is married to Sam Asgari.

Spears has an active presence on various social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. She also has official websites at britney.com and britneyspears.com.

Britney Jean Spears (born December 2, 1981) is an American singer, songwriter, and dancer. She is credited with influencing the revival of teen pop during the late 1990s and early 2000s, for which she is referred to as the "Princess of Pop". Regarded as a pop icon, Spears has sold nearly 150 million records worldwide, including over 70 million solely in the United States, making her one of the world's best-selling music artists.

After appearing in stage productions and television series, Spears signed with Jive Records in 1997 at age 15. Her first two studio albums, ...Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops!... I Did It Again (2000), are among the best-selling albums of all time and made Spears the best-selling teenage artist of all time. With first-week sales of over 1.3 million copies, Oops!... I Did It Again held the record for the fastest-selling album by a female artist in the United States for 15 years. Spears adopted more mature and provocative style for her albums Britney (2001) and In the Zone (2003), and starred in the 2002 film Crossroads.

Spears was executive producer of her fifth studio album Blackout (2007), often referred to as her best work. Following a series of highly publicized personal problems, promotion for the album was limited, and Spears was involuntarily placed in a conservatorship. Since then, she released the chart-topping albums, Circus (2008) and Femme Fatale (2011), the latter of which became her most successful era of singles in the US charts. She embarked on a four-year concert residency, Britney: Piece of Me, at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas to promote her next two albums Britney Jean (2013) and Glory (2016). In 2019, Spears's legal battle over her conservatorship became more publicized and led to the establishment of the #FreeBritney movement. In 2021, the conservatorship was terminated following her public testimony in which she accused her management team and family of abuse.

Spears in May 2013

Spears has achieved six number-one albums on the Billboard 200[7] and four number-one singles on the US Billboard Hot 100: "...Baby One More Time", "Womanizer", "3", and "Hold It Against Me". As a featured artist, the "S&M" remix also topped the Billboard chart. Her singles "Oops!... I Did It Again", "Toxic", and "Scream & Shout" topped the charts in most countries. With "3" in 2009 and "Hold It Against Me" in 2011, Spears became the second artist after Mariah Carey in the Hot 100's history to debut at number one with two or more songs. Her heavily choreographed videos earned her the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. She has earned numerous other awards and accolades, including a Grammy Award, 15 Guinness World Records, six MTV Video Music Awards, seven Billboard Music Awards (including the Millennium Award), the inaugural Radio Disney Icon Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Spears was ranked by Billboard as the eighth-biggest artist of the 2000s. In the United States, she is the fourth best-selling female album artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era as well as the best-selling female album artist of the 2000s. "...Baby One More Time" was named the greatest debut single of all time by Rolling Stone in 2020. In 2004, Spears launched a perfume brand with Elizabeth Arden, Inc.; sales exceeded $1.5 billion as of 2012. Forbes has reported Spears as the highest-paid female musician of 2002 and 2012. By 2012, she had topped Yahoo!'s list of most searched celebrities seven times in 12 years. Time named Spears one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021, winning the reader poll by receiving the highest number of votes.

1981–1997: Early life and career beginnings

Britney Jean Spears was born on December 2, 1981, in McComb, Mississippi, the second child of James "Jamie" Parnell Spears and Lynne Irene Bridges. Her maternal grandmother, Lillian Portell, was English (born in London), and one of Spears's maternal great-great-grandfathers was Maltese. Her siblings are Bryan James Spears and Jamie Lynn Spears. 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 has studied Kabbalist teachings. On August 5, 2021, Spears announced that she had converted to Catholicism. Her mother, sister, and nieces Maddie Aldridge and Ivey Joan Watson, are also Catholic.

At age three, Spears began attending dance lessons in her hometown of Kentwood, Louisiana, and was selected to perform as a solo artist at the annual recital. Aged five she made her local stage debut, singing "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 her mother 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; shortly afterward, Lynne and her daughters moved to a sublet apartment in New York.[citation needed]

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 a number of commercials. In December 1992, she was cast in The Mickey Mouse Club alongside Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling, and Keri Russell. After the show was canceled in 1994, 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 was in talks 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 made. 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 "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 "It 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 Spears returned to the United States, she embarked on a shopping mall promotional tour to promote her upcoming debut album. Her show was a four-song set and she was accompanied by two back-up dancers. Her first concert tour followed, as an opening act for NSYNC. Her debut studio album, ...Baby One More Time, was released on January 12, 1999. It debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 and was certified two-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America after a month. Worldwide, 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.