‘Baby’ boom: How Britney Spears became the princess of pop 25 years ago

nypost.com:

Max Martin had written that song for TLC. He wrote it as, like, an R&B record,” Barry Weiss — who was then president of Spears’ label, Jive Records — told The Post. “But that didn’t work out.

And the next thing was that Arista [Records] wanted the song for Deborah Cox … but Max wasn’t interested in that.”Finally, the Swedish hitmaker got a serendipitous suggestion from Jive’s Dutch A&R head Martin Dodd. “He proposed that, ‘Max, why don’t you try this with this young artist Britney Spears that they just signed in New York?’ ” recalled Weiss. “And that was the beginning of history.”No doubt: Catapulted by its schoolgirl-power video, “…Baby One More Time” would go on to top the charts the same week that its like-named album — which was released on Jan.

12, 1999 — debuted at No. 1. And as the hits — and TRL-tailored clips — kept coming with “Sometimes,” “(You Drive Me) Crazy” and “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart,” Spears’ debut LP became one of the best-selling albums of all time, selling over 14 million copies in the US and over 25 million worldwide.Indeed, at the turn of the new millennium, a new pop princess was crowned at the age of 17.And even while Spears vowed that she’ll never return to music just last week, her ascension from Disney Channel darling on “The All-New Mickey Mouse Club” to a certified cultural phenomenon changed the game for everyone from Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift (who would become a future Martin collaborator) to Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodrigo. “The modern blueprint for being a pop star in this millennium is because, at the end of the last one, Britney Spears made it big,” said Lori Majewski, host of SiriusXM’s “Fierce: Women in Music,” who was Entertainment Editor at Teen People magazine when.