*NSYNC Moves 1.87 Million Copies Of 'Celebrity' In One Week

NY (AP) - *NSYNC sold approximately 1.88 million copies of its latest album, Celebrity, in its first week of release, landing firmly atop the Billboard 200 album chart. Celebrity's first-week album sales outpaced every album in the Soundscan era except for *NSYNC's own 2000 album, No Strings Attached.
Chris Kirkpatrick recently joked with LAUNCH about how ironic it would be to sell more than a million-and-a-half copies of Celebrity and still have it be considered a sales slump. "I think the best thing about it is the fact that we could sell a million-and-a-half records in one week's time and suddenly we'll be falling off," he said. "To us, that won't bother us at all because we've put together such a solid album that if we sell 100,000 albums our first week, in our eyes, according to this album, we could sell 100,000 albums for the next four years every week because we're so confident in the album and we're so confident in what we do."

NSYNC's previous album No Strings Attached was the first album to sell more than 2 million copies in its debut week, moving 2.4 million copies the week it bowed in March 2000. Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP posted the second-highest-ever premiere week sales, 1.76 million, later on in 2000.
Kirkpatrick's groupmate J.C. Chasez explained that the state of the economy has a lot to do with album sales this year. "Music really is in a different place in the sales market, period," he said. "You know, nobody's doing the numbers that they did last year. Music was just selling at an all-time high last year"

Kirkpatrick also noted that the important thing is that the members of *NSYNC really enjoy what they do for a living. "The coolest thing is people meet us and go, 'I didn't realize you guys were just so cool.' You know, it's just like we're not trying to be anything we're not.," he said. "We just have a good time. We enjoy people. We enjoy hanging out with everybody. We enjoy our music. We enjoy what we do. We enjoy touring. We enjoy every aspect of our job, so why not just have fun with it?"