AGGIELIFE
Thursday, March 30. 20(X)
THE BATTALION
Page 5
Teen band ’N Sync sets sales record
2.4 million copies of latest album, No Strings Attached, sold in 7 days
NEW YORK (AP) — It’s been nothing but “buy
buy buy” for ’N Syne fans.
In a remarkable display of teen-age buying pow
er, the pop heartthrobs sold 2.4 million copies of their
new disc in seven days — more than double the pre
vious record. The disc features their latest hit “Bye,
Bye, Bye.”
Sales of their No Strings Attached album
swamped the 1.13 million sold by k N Sync’s fellow
boy band, the Backstreet Boys, last year.
In fact, executives at 'N Sync’s label. Jive
Records, suspect the sales record was broken in just
one day, when No Strings Attached first appeared in
stores March 21. But the executives have no figures
to confirm this.
“It’s pretty staggering,” Barry Weiss, Jive Records
president, said Wednesday. “It’s pretty amazing, it’s
pretty numbing, it’s pretty great. This is really what
the music business needs — it's getting young peo
ple interested in music again.”
Since 'N Sync came from the same Orlando-based
hit factory as fellow Jive artists Backstreet Boys, they
have long been considered junior partners at best,
knockoffs at worst. Not anymore.
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“It’s like going into the Super Bowl,” said ’N
Sync’s manager, Johnny Wright. “You always want
to come out on top. If you have defending champions,
you want to knock them off.”
“[The sales are] pretty
staggering. It's pretty
amazing, it's pretty
numbing, it's pretty
great. This is what the
music business needs. .
— Barry Weiss
Jive Records president
A burgeoning teen population — the children of
the original rock ’n’ roll generation — and a boom
ing economy combined to trigger the explosion of
sales, said Alan Light, editor of Spin magazine.
The success of the Backstreet Boys, Britney
Spears and Christina Aguilera have paved the way for
mainstream media acceptance of’N Sync, Light said.
The band has appeared on magazine covers, was on
“Saturday Night Live” three weeks ago and is a reg
ular on MTV.
’N Sync touched off a mini-riot outside MTV’s
Times Square studio when it performed there the
weekend before the album was released.
Band members are personable and accessible to
their fans, particularly girls aged 8 to 18 who worship
them, Weiss said.
Besides the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, only
two other albums are known to have sold more than
1 million copies in a week: Garth Brooks’ Double
Live album and the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, ac
cording to Soundscan.
The company has been measuring album sales in
the U.S. since 1991; precise sales figures before then
are considered somewhat unreliable.
Jive, which pressed more than 6 million copies of
the CD to be ready for the consumer rush, will try to
break its own record when the Backstreet Boys re
lease a new album in October.
Internet hoaxes, rumors, pranks
not limited to April Fool’s Day
News in Brief
NEW YORK (AP) — Free trips to
Disney World, courtesy of Microsoft
Corp.? Free soda from Coca-Cola? Free
cars from Honda?
Forget it!
You don’t have to wait for April Fools'
Day. Every day is a joke on the Internet. As
the Net grows, so do the number of hoaxes
and other mischief carried through email.
Rumors, pranks and hoaxes are not
unique to the Internet, but they spread
more quickly because of it, said Barbara
Mikkelson, who runs a Web site that tries
to dispel such myths.
“Before, when 1 had a hot piece of gos
sip, 1 had to find my best friend and share
it over a fence,” she said. “Now I don’t
have to wait.”
Take the Neiman Marcus “cookie
recipe.” Someone supposedly is billed
$250 for the store’s $2.50 recipe. In re
venge, she forwards copies of the recipe to
friends —and urges them to do the same.
Mien the rumor began circulating of
fline more than a decade ago, the depart
ment store didn’t sell cookies at its restau
rants. The tale later made its way to the
Internet—and the company still gets calls
and letters.
To play along, Neiman Marcus creat
ed a recipe and then gave it away — for
free. “It can be a big distraction,” spokes
woman Ginger Reeder said. “The only
way you handle it is with good humor and
grace.”
No one quite knows the roots of such
myths.
“1 suspect they are the result of creative
minds trapped in boring jobs,” said Brian
Maddox of Barrington, 111., a regular re
cipient of electronic chain letters.
But such messages can clog company
computers, trigger mistrust or encourage
risky behavior. Internet users tired of virus
hoaxes might ignore real threats. Sun-
bathers believing that sunscreen causes
blindness might avoid the salve and risk
sunburn or skin cancer.
“There's
a lot of
hooey
on the
Internet.
GATES
David Spalding, who writes the online
column “Hoax du Jour,” said friends and
relatives often spread such “cyberban leg
ends” with good intent. They are difficult
to stop, he said, because “it’s hard to tell
Grandma or your brother, ‘Don’t send me
email.’”
While Internet veterans may see
through the hoaxes, newcomers often do
not. As they get wiser, new generations of
believers log on.
“People bring with them some old
habits they learned from getting most of
their information from the traditional me
dia, mostly the ability to trust,” said David
Emery, who tracks urban legends for
About.com. “They are not prepared for the
anarchy.”
Emery offers these tips: Assume con
tents are false unless proven otherwise. Be
skeptical ifan ofter—free Coke, free cars
— appears overly generous. Verify before
forwarding.
Alissa Strauss of Chicago learned that
lesson. On the off-chance that she could re
place an 11-year-old junker, she forward
ed the Honda “promotion” to friends. In
stead of a car, she got back Honda’s denial
and a friend’s threat: “Never do this again.”
“I really need a car,” Strauss said later.
“I just hoped, even though I don’t ever be
lieve in these.”
Some companies may not be so for
giving. Citing a nonexistent study, one
prankster falsely claimed that Kentucky
Fried Chicken uses no chicken and thus
had to change its name to KFC. The com
pany posted a denial on its Web site and
vowed to find the troublemaker.
For Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates,
chain letters are an abuse of technology
and a waste of time. “There’s a lot of hooey
on the Internet,” he wrote on his compa
ny’s Website.
Charles Hymes, who runs Don’t Spread
That Hoax online, laughs — and agrees.
“The line between a hoax and ajoke is
sometimes pretty thin,” he conceded.
“There’s nothing so outrageous, so goofy,
that it won’t be believed by thousands and
thousands of people.”
Consider last year’s alert: For spring
cleaning, all computer users should dis
connect from 11:59 p.m. March 31 to
12:01 a.m. April 2, Greenwich Mean
Time. Of course, if Internet users did
just that, there would be no Internet left
to clean up.
LifeSavers to keep
pineapple flavor
TRENTON, NJ. (AP) — Life-
Savers’ basic Five Flavor roll will
stay just the way it is after all —
complete with pineapple.
The company, a division of Par-
sippany-based Nabisco Inc., had
toyed with the idea of dropping it
from the Five Ravor roll, which for 65
years has been the same: lime,
lemon, cherry, orange and pineapple.
But a wave of telephone and
Internet votes from customers in
dicated that most people thought
the idea was, well, un-holey.
“There are a lot of pineapple afi
cionados out there," said Jim Gold
man, LifeSavers’ president.
"That’s what they want, so that’s
what we’re going to give them.”
He said company research indi
cated that pineapple was the least
popular of the Five Flavor roll. Ex
ecutives thought adding strawberry
or watermelon would boost sales
and please palates. So they set up
special telephone lines and an In
ternet site to let people decide
whether to deep-six pineapple.
More than a million votes were
cast, and pineapple tallied 54 per
cent of the vote, whipping water
melon (25 percent) and strawber
ry (21 percent.)
To celebrate pineapple’s re
prieve, the company is hiding spe
cial pineapple-only rolls among
shipments of Five Flavor. Those
who get one will win its weight in
gold, a prize Goldman said could be
worth as much as $4,000.
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A panel discussion with inspiring
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March 30. 2000
Clavton Williams. Jr. Alumni Center
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Upcoming Graduate Student Events
Texas A6-M Career Center
★Mar 30
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Environmental Issues Committee
Texas A&M University Student Government Association