The selling power of Girl Power

By Rachel Lloyd

Today marks 20 years since “Wannabe” – the debut single from the Spice Girls – was released. Music critics did not take kindly to it. Smash Hits considered the single “awful” and “limp”, Top of the Pops magazine said the group could never take off and NME went so far as to vote it the worst single of the year. The Economist, meanwhile, asked “what do the Spice Girls mean?”

Yet it quickly became clear that whatever it was that the Spice Girls were selling was valuable: a few days after its release, “Wannabe” climbed to number one in both the US and UK charts, where it sat obstinately for seven weeks. It is now one of the best-selling singles of all time; “Spice”, the studio album from which the song was taken, has sold more than 30m copies worldwide. No other British girl band has come remotely close since.