Feels like yesterday, but times have changed: Britney Spears' 'Baby One More Time' is 20 today

Here's a fact sure to make certain you all immediately feel your age – Britney Spears' … Baby One More Time is 20 years old today. Inhale a deep breath and absorb the anthemic 'loneliness' that has been 'killing' Britney for two whole decades. Even the dots that punctuate the song’s title feel dated, a cute late ’90s affectation. Released on October 23 in 1998, Spears' debut isn't just one of the 40 best-selling singles ever – joining the elite rank of ten million-plus sellers alongside YMCA , Macarena and Kung Fu Fighting – and it's way more than simply the soundtrack of a generation. And it's not just the song which launched Spears' career – it's the song which launched the last career of its kind. We’ll simply never know Britney’s type again – a stratospheric superstar so successfully born of a cynical corporate machine. It’s not a coincidence that no song has crossed the landmark eight-figure sales mark since Britney’s pink-bunned pigtails – that no singer has reaped the riches of ten-million physical singles sales since. Because that machine doesn’t exist anymore. The year 1999 was the peak of recorded music sales in the USA – the moment when music was at its most lucrative, but regimented, with a key roster of four record companies dictating the vast bulk of what we heard and bought. A childhood feature of Disney's The Mickey Mouse Club TV show rampantly groomed for fame, Spears is the last in a line of manufactured female icons, following in the footsteps of eccentrically aging divas such as Mariah Carey and Cher, both of which her Vegas-residency late career seems ever-closer to resembling. At the turn of the millennium, the iPod wasn't born yet. The internet existed, but only in dial-up for most. The concept of streaming the entire history of popular music from your Nokia phone would have looked like something from Star Trek . What new music was heard primarily reached listeners through the culture-jamming uniformity of music television. It is also no coincidence that the legacy of … Baby One More Time 's video is as great as its music. Legend holds that it was Spears who swapped up director Nigel Dick's planned jeans and t-shirt costume – and came up with the crucial trick of tying a knot at the midriff of her hastily purchased white supermarket shirt. Fuelling a worrying pre-occupation with school uniforms, Spears' stunt pushed barriers of taste just far enough to burn a hole in the world's collective retinas – Billboard readers voted …Baby One More Time the best music video of the 1990s, with a wailing 40 per cent of the populace, while Jam!'s audience declared it the third most influential video in the history of pop music. And then there's the music. Because … Baby One More Time didn't just launch Britney. It launched the career of Max Martin – and arguably the whole modern age of celebrity super-songwriters. Rejected by Backstreet Boys and TLC, …Baby One More Time would eventually offer Martin his first, precious, career-defining number one record. Today, he holds credits on more Billboard chart-toppers than anyone since Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Martin is the evil professor behind unshakeable earworms from Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl , Maroon 5's One More Night to The Weeknd's Can't Feel My Face . His staple of 23 chart-topping hits dwarfs Spears' haul – Martin also penned her fifth and final number one, 2011's Hold it Against Me – and his legacy is far greater than the singer's. Today, the Swedish hitmaker is not struggling to stay relevant, nor forced to take Vegas residencies, à la Britney, to stay on top. Instead Martin’s influence has held a huge sway over the last decade of popular music, through his own work and that of his “disciples”, which include Savan Kotecha, Dr Luke and Shellback, whose collective client-base – One Direction, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Pink – represent a particularly prevalent brand of modern music. Yet this genetically mutated strand of earworms might never have been gestated had the Swedish super-producer not clocked his first number one, sung by some 16-year-old called Britney Spears, with the almost prophetically named … Baby One More Time . _____________ Read more

Feels like yesterday, but times have changed: Britney Spears' 'Baby One More Time' is 20 today

Released on October 23, 1998, the debut of then 16-year-old Spears came out before the iPod and when the internet was still dial up for most people. And that is why her success story will never be repeated