When the 20th century came to a close, the music industry was booming, lucrative in ways previously unimaginable. Young people's purchasing power was matched with a measure of political power in MTV's Total Request Live , an outlet to vote for their favorite artists and have their picks ritualistically blasted into their living rooms every afternoon after school.
And on any given day, you could safely assume that one of a half-dozen teen pop artists was dominating the conversation. In , the Backstreet Boys' Millennium set an all-time record for first-week sales, with 1. Britney Spears beat that figure the following spring, with 1. I Did It Again in its first week. By the end of the week, that number had doubled to 2.
And then, barely two years later, it was all over. Twenty years removed, the popular narrative around No Strings Attached goes something like this: NSYNC burned bright and fast, one of the last artists to benefit so greatly from the industry bubble before its spectacular burst.
NSYNC's de facto frontman, Justin Timberlake , seemed to sense the change in the air early; his solo debut, Justified , landed in a pop landscape that its super-producers The Neptunes had already begun to shape in their own image. No Strings Attached is so often invoked as a point on a fraught economic timeline that it's easy to forget you can listen to it, too.
But when seen for its substance — its forward-thinking production, its genre-expanding collaborations, the videos and choreography that made it as much a visual presentation as an audio one — it tells a much more rewarding story than what the numbers show.
