The accolades keep coming in for Britney Spears' huge new single "Hold It Against Me." It remains on top of the iTunes sales chart, has been played on radio thousands of times in a week and is almost guaranteed to debut at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 this week. That would make "Hold It Against Me" only the 18th single in history to debut on top of the chart, the third in the past 12 months (Eminem's "Not Afraid" and Ke$ha's "We R Who We R" also pulled it off) and the second for Spears (her "3" debuted on top of the chart in 2009). That's an awful lot of history behind the first single from Spears' still-untitled seventh album, which could be why the readers of the MTV Newsroom Blog declared "Hold It Against Me" the best lead single of Spears' career.
In a poll that kicked off last week and closed on Monday (January 17), "Hold It Against Me" took the top spot with 34 percent of the vote. The fact that "Hold It Against Me" won is pretty impressive, as it was up against some truly killer, iconic singles. For instance, the punchy "Gimme More" took second place with 15 percent of the vote. It was followed by "...Baby One More Time" and "I'm a Slave 4 U," which each collected 12 percent.
The rest of the field included "Womanizer" (10 percent), "Oops! ... I Did It Again" (six percent), "3" and "My Prerogative" (four percent each). Interestingly, Spears' Madonna-assisted "Me Against the Music" came in last, grabbing only three percent of the vote (though the other singles from that album, 2003's In the Zone, became much bigger, including "Toxic" and "Everytime"). With "Hold It Against Me" already under her belt and making a lot of noise, expect Spears to have one of the biggest years of any artist out there — and perhaps of all time.