For any musician, it's the second album that is always the hardest, especially after the debut performs well. The sophomore release is difficult, as it has the pressure of the first album's success coupled with the fact that it usually has to be put together in a shorter time frame than the first one did. It's a slippery slope, and even some of the biggest bands in the universe have stumbled on their second release. Such was not the case for the Backstreet Boys, who followed up their self-titled debut with Millennium on this day in 1999.
Even though Millennium is only 11 years old, it's difficult to contemplate how massive it was at the time. The album shipped more than 11 million copies in a single year, and sold almost 10 million of those in 1999 alone. To put that in perspective, the top-selling album of 2009 was Taylor Swift's Fearless, which actually came out in 2008 and sold just over three million. They sold 500,000 copies of Millennium on the first day of its release. Even the biggest stars of today — Jay-Z, Eminem, Swift, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber — don't come anywhere close to the selling power of Backstreet. They were, as the song goes, "Larger Than Life."
On the day of Millennium's release, the Backstreet Boys made their way to New York City's Times Square for a visit to "Total Request Live," a hotly-anticipated event that attracted over 5,000 fans and forced the police to shut down the area because of the size of the crowd. That mass of people had been built up because of "I Want It That Way," the first single from Millennium and the biggest hit of the Boys' career.