Teen Pop Takes Off in 2000

In March 2000, Barry Weiss was skiing in Colorado when the phone calls started coming in. Weiss, the president of Jive Records, was dumbstruck when an employee gave him the early sales figures for 'NSync's second album, No Strings Attached. "It was unbelievable," he recalls. "Usually after the first day, numbers drop off drastically. It didn't happen this time." The album eventually sold more than 2.4 million copies in its first week, more than doubling the previous record held by another Jive act, Backstreet Boys, who moved 1.1 million copies of their 1999 effort, Millennium in its debut week.

Weiss returned to New York and did what any successful executive would do: He partied. "We went to the Palm and had lobster," he says. "It was the ultimate."

The sales explosion for No Strings Attached was the high point in the tidal wave of teen-pop acts that ruled the charts, airwaves and cash registers in the late Nineties. Coming off the gloom of the grunge era -- punctuated by the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994 -- the country's mood began to brighten and the economy started to hum. "People were feeling good," says 'NSync member JC Chasez. "And people love pop albums. They love albums by Michael Jackson and George Michael. And when we started, there wasn't anything like that."