*NSYNC - The Peak Of The Hit Bubble

But even as *NSYNC was celebrating its huge launch, the ground was shifting beneath the industry. The Nasdaq had crashed the week before the album’s release, and continued to fall sickeningly the rest of the year as the dot.com bubble burst.

No other albums that year set records, and total music sales fell, for only the third time in two decades.

Over the next few years, even after the overall economy recovered, the economics of the music industry got worse. Something fundamental had changed in 2000. Sales fell 2.5 percent in 2001, 6.8 percent in 2002, and just kept dropping.

By the end of 2005 (down another 7 percent), music sales in the United States had dwindled more than a quarter from their peak. Twenty of the all-time top 100 albums had come out in the five-year period between 1996 and 2000.

The next five years produced only two—OutKast’s Speakerboxx/The Love Below and Norah Jones’s Come Away with Me—rank 92 and 95, respectively.

It’s altogether possible that *NSYNC’s first-week record will never be broken.

Imagine if this boy band goes down in history not just for launching Justin Timberlake but also for marking the very peak of the hit bubble, the last bit of manufactured pop to use the twentieth century’s fine-tuned marketing machine to its fullest, before the gears were stripped and the wheels fell off.