Twenty-five years after her VMA performance, Spears’ Neptunes-produced song has become a hit with Gen Z
It’s been 25 years since Britney Spears stormed the VMAs stage with a snake on her shoulder to perform “I’m a Slave 4 U,” but new Spotify data shows a majority of the track’s listeners weren’t even born when the song came out.
While millennials grew up with Spears, Spotify says the majority of recent streams for “Slave 4 U” were from Gen Z listeners — e.g. those born between 1997 to 2012. More than 55 percent of global streams in the past month came from the cohort. Perhaps more surprisingly, Spotify tells Rolling Stone that 27 percent of streams for the track were from listeners who were born in the years after Spears debuted the song on MTV.
What’s more, Spotify says there have been over 40 million “discoveries” of Spears’ catalog on the streaming platform this year, denoting people who are streaming her songs for the first time or “re-streaming” for the first time in six months or more. Sixty percent of these “discoveries” have come from Gen Z listeners.
The data shows the continued staying power of “I’m a Slave 4 U,” which was produced by the Neptunes and marked a departure from Spears’ heavily-produced teen pop sounds on previous releases. Spotify says streams of the single spike each year around this time to celebrate the song’s anniversary, and they are likely to spike again ahead of the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards this weekend.
“Slave 4 U” was the first single from Spears’ third studio album, Britney, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this October. Spears became the first female artist to have her first three studio albums debut atop the Billboard 200 chart when Britney hit number one. The album has gone on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide.
