Britney Spears

Britney Jean Spears (born December 2, 1981) is an American singer. Dubbed the "Princess of Pop", she has received widespread acknowledgement as being one of the first musicians credited for reviving the teen pop genre and her influence on pop music and culture of the 21st century. Spears has sold 150 million records worldwide, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time. Spears' formative influences include Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Whitney Houston. In 1992, she began her professional career as a cast member for the Ruthless! musical and The All-New Mickey Mouse Club television series. After signing with Jive Records in 1997, Spears released her first two studio albums, ...Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops!... I Did It Again (2000), both of which rank among the best-selling albums of all time. She developed a more mature style for her next two albums, Britney (2001) and In the Zone (2003). Her 2007 album Blackout, which Spears executive produced, earned her the greatest acclaim as a solo artist. By the late 2000s, she had performed on more than two dozen U.S. Top 100 hits, including the number-ones "...Baby One More Time" (1998), "Womanizer" (2008) and "3" (2009). Facing lifelong public scrutiny and personal struggles, Spears entered into a conservatorship in 2008 due to her declining mental health. In the 2010s, her first professional comeback spawned Circus (2008) and Femme Fatale (2011), as well as the 2013–2017 concert residency Britney: Piece of Me. In 2019, Spears withdrew from regular concert touring to focus on her conservatorship case, leading to the #FreeBritney movement and the release of the documentary Framing Britney Spears (2021). The conservatorship was dissolved in 2021 after she publicly testified against her management team and family of abuse. Two years later, her memoir, The Woman in Me, debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list. Other ventures include her starring role in the 2002 comedy-drama film Crossroads and launching numerous products, with her 2005 fragrance Fantasy with Elizabeth Arden, Inc. generating over $1.5 billion in sales by 2011. 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 listed as the world's highest-paid female musician in 2001 and 2012 by Forbes. Spears received numerous industry awards including a Grammy Award, fifteen Guinness World Records, six MTV Video Music Awards, and seven Billboard Music Awards (including the Millennium Award). She was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003.