Britney Spears

Britney Jean Spears (born December 2, 1981) is an American singer and dancer. Often referred to as the "Princess of Pop", she is credited with influencing the revival of teen pop during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Spears has sold over 150 million records worldwide, making her one of the world's best-selling music artists. She has earned numerous 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. Her heavily choreographed music videos earned her the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award.

After appearing in stage productions and television series, Spears signed with Jive Records in 1997 at age fifteen. 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 fifteen years. Spears adopted a more mature and provocative style for her albums ''Britney'' (2001) and ''In the Zone'' (2003), and starred in the 2002 film ''Crossroads''. She 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.

Subsequently, Spears 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. With "3" in 2009 and "Hold It Against Me" in 2011, Spears became the second artist in history to debut at number one with two or more songs on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100. 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' 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 published her first memoir, ''The Woman in Me'', in 2023, which became a #1 ''New York Times'' best-seller in its first week of release.

In the United States, Spears 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. She was ranked by ''Billboard'' as the eighth-biggest artist of the 2000s. Spears has had six number-one albums on the ''Billboard'' 200 and five number-one singles on the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100: "...Baby One More Time", "Womanizer", "3", "Hold It Against Me", and "S&M (Remix)". Other hit singles include "Oops!... I Did It Again", "I'm a Slave 4 U", "Toxic", "Gimme More", and "Piece of Me". "...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 . ''Forbes'' listed Spears as the world's highest-paid female musician in 2001 and 2012. By 2012, she had topped Yahoo!'s list of most searched celebrities seven times in twelve years. ''Time'' named Spears one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021. Spears placed first in the ''Time'' reader poll. Provided by Wikipedia