7 Fun Facts About Britney Spears’s ‘Oops! … I Did It Again’

On April 11, 2000, an 18-year-old Britney Spears released “Oops! … I Did It Again,” the first single off her sophomore album of the same name. The album itself followed on May 16, 2000, giving fans a summer soundtrack that they absolutely knew they needed. In honor of its 25th birthday, here are some entertaining behind-the-scenes facts about Oops! … I Did It Again.

1. The album set a first-week sales record for a female artist.
2. The Titanic interlude in “Oops! … I Did It Again” was there for a reason.
3. It was Spears’s idea to cover the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
4. Spears loved performing “Don’t Go Knockin’ on My Door.”
5. Shania Twain cowrote “Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know.”
6. The album prompted a copyright infringement lawsuit.
7. “Dear Diary” was Spears’s first cowriting credit.

The album set a first-week sales record for a female artist.

Oops! … I Did It Again sold a staggering 1,319,000 copies in its first week—setting a record for one-week sales of an album by a female artist. The only album ahead of it at the time was *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, which sold 2.4 million copies in its first week on the market in March 2000. Two albums have since surpassed No Strings Attached: Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department (2.6 million) and Adele’s 25 (nearly 3.4 million).

The Titanic interlude in “Oops! … I Did It Again” was there for a reason.

A little over two minutes into the title track, Spears stops singing to have the following exchange with some guy: 

Him: “Britney! Before you go, there’s something I want you to have.”
Her: “Oh, it’s beautiful. But wait a minute, isn’t this—”
Him: “Yeah, yes it is.”
Her: “But I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in the end.”
Him: “Well, baby, I went down and got it for you.”
Her: “Aw, you shouldn’t have.”

It’s enough context to deduce that they’re talking about the blue diamond “Heart of the Ocean” necklace from Titanic (1997), even though they never mention the film by name or show the item in the music video. “Titanic was obviously big and we needed a bridge,” the song’s cowriter and coproducer Rami Yacoub told The Ringer in 2020. “Because MTV was so massive at the time, we were always imagining the video as we wrote the song.”

Copyright law prevented them from being more direct in their references, but they had originally planned to borrow one of Titanic’s most important components for the music video: Leonardo DiCaprio. According to The Ringer, DiCaprio had reportedly signed on to be Spears’s love interest but bowed out due to a conflict. Eli Swanson (who later became an orthopedic surgeon) took his place; the voice on the track belongs to cowriter and coproducer Max Martin.

It was Spears’s idea to cover the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

It was Spears’s idea to have Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins—the R&B producer behind hits like Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” and “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy and Monica—work with her on a cover. The song she chose was the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which she had liked as a kid. “I talked to [Jerkins] about it at a party once. I was like, ‘We should do something together,’ so I just threw the idea at him,” she told The Press of Atlantic City in 2000. They recorded the track despite reluctance from her record label reps, who changed their tune after they heard it.

In addition to giving the rock ‘n’ roll classic a Y2K hip-hop makeover, Spears and company updated the second verse from “When I’m watching my TV / And a man comes on and tells me / How white my shirts can be / Well he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke / The same cigarettes as me” to “When I’m watching my TV / And that girl comes on and tells me / How tight my skirts should be / But she can’t tell me who to be, baby / I got my own identity.”

Spears loved performing “Don’t Go Knockin’ on My Door.”

During her tour in 2000, Spears named “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” as one of her two favorite songs to perform. The other was “Don’t Go Knockin’ on My Door,” addressed to a pesky ex that she’s just so over. “[What] I’m saying in those songs is totally me,” Spears told the Orlando Sentinel. “I’m expressing myself and I can totally go there and feel what I’m saying, you know?”

Shania Twain cowrote “Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know.”

Shania Twain cowrote “Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know” by being in the right place at the right time. Her then-husband, producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, was working on the song with Spears in a studio located at the couple’s home in Switzerland, so Twain ended up getting involved. “She was very sweet and it was a great experience to get to know her on a really behind-the-scenes level a little bit,” Twain said in a 2017 Fuse interview. It wasn’t the last Spears-Twain crossover event: Spears sang along to “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” in 2002’s Crossroads.

The album prompted a copyright infringement lawsuit.

In 2002, songwriters Michael Cottrill and Lawrence Wnukowski filed a lawsuit claiming that Spears’s songs “What U See Is What U Get” and “Can’t Make You Love Me” ripped off their copyrighted song “What You See Is What You Get,” which they had given to Spears’s camp in late 1999. They then dropped “Can’t Make You Love Me” to focus the suit on “What U See Is What U Get.” In 2003, a judge dismissed the case on the strength of testimony from the defense that the melody of Spears’s song was already finished by the time the plaintiffs passed theirs along. Plus, the judge wrote, “the similarities between the two songs would not lead a reasonable juror to conclude that the creators of [Spears’s song] copied [Cottrill and Wnukowski’s] work.”

“Dear Diary” was Spears’s first cowriting credit.

The final track of Oops! is “Dear Diary,” a confessional ballad about a new crush. Spears cowrote the song—a career first for her. Spears told New Jersey’s Home News Tribune that sharing her lyrics with “the greatest producers in the world” was somewhat anxiety-inducing, prompting thoughts like “What will they think?” and “Does that suck?” Her producers apparently thought her work passed muster, but the song had its detractors. For 13-year-old reviewer Demitrio Ramirez, it was the only bad track on a “pretty good” CD. He thought it was “too slow.”

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