Popular Success
The single broke the record for most radio station adds in its first week with 165. It reached the number one spot on the Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks charts, where it stayed for ten non consecutive weeks. On the Billboard Top 40 Mainstream chart, it set a record for most weeks at number one. The single, however, failed to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking and then stalling out at number six for eight non-consecutive weeks. The song hit big in the United Kingdom, where it debuted at number one. "I Want It That Way" made chart history in the Netherlands being the first single ever to debut at number one in the Top 40, without being in the "Tip Parade" first.
The song also entered the charts at number one in Italy, Spain, Canada, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. The song is also highly critically acclaimed. The song was voted number three on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the '90s in December 2007, number ten in the MTV/Rolling Stone list of the "100 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time" in 2000. It was ranked number sixteen on Blender Magazine's 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born list and number sixty-one on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs Of The Past 25 Years in June 2003. It was ranked number one in MTV's Top 99 Of 99 special.
The song was also the 15th biggest selling boyband single of the 90's in the UK selling 423,300 copies. The video itself ranked as number three on the top 10 list of the most iconic videos of all time at the TRL finale. The song was also nominated for three Grammys in 2000 for Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Pop Duo or Group Performance; it lost all three to Santana's "Smooth."
Read more about this topic: I Want It That Way
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or success:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)