Thursday May 27th, 1999
'Millennium' smashes sales Records

By Ken Barns, USA TODAY

Records were made to be broken -- especially record sales records. Just a
week after Ricky Martin scored 1999's top sales week and achieved the
best-selling first week ever for a contemporary pop artist, the Backstreet
Boys' second album, Millennium, shattered those records and sold more copies
in a week than any album in any genre, 1,134,000.

The total edged Garth Brooks' record of 1,085,000, the amount his Double Live
album sold in it's first week last November. According to SoundScan, which
has electronically tabulated record sales since 1991, only one other album in
that era has sold more than a million albums in a week; The Bodyguard
soundtrack, which tallied 1.06 million during Christmas week of 1992.

"It's a wonderful week for pop culture," says Barry Weiss, president for the
Backstreet Boys' label, Jive Records. "You've got the Backstreet Boys and
Star Wars."

He adds, "This is a great thing for the record industry. It shows you that
when you make records that appeal to a wide demographic, you can still create
a phenomenon."

Backstreet has been labeled a teen-idol act, but the audience seems to be
broader, says Geoff Mayfield, director of chats for Billboard, which
publishes the SoundScan tallies. "Their fan base is mostly youth, but I can't
imagine selling that many albums just to kids."

More Backstreet Facts:

-Nearly one of every 11 albums purchased was a cope for the new Backstreet
Boys album -- far above the normal ratio.

-Millennium was released simultaneously worldwide and is estimated to have
sold over 8 million copies globally.

-It matched it's US No. 1 debut by topping charts in Germany, Canada,
Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Spain, Mexico, Holland, Greece, Norway and
Portugal.

-Jive estimates that the album sold close to 500,000 copies in the USA in
it's first day -- nearly enough to be certified gold in a day.