Britney Spears Fans Got Petty In Honor Of Justin Timberlake's New Single

Make no mistake: Britney Spears fans have *not* forgiven Justin Timberlake. On Jan. 25, Timberlake released his new song, “Selfish,” which serves as the lead single his new album Everything I Thought It Was, coming March 15. (The album will be Timberlake’s first in five years.) But the song isn’t getting the same attention that comebacks usually bring. Instead, the release prompted Spears fans to promote her 2011 song of the same name — and their campaign was seriously successful.

As with most pop music stunts, the idea was formed on stan Twitter... well, now I guess it’s called stan X. On Jan. 22, @BritneyTheStan wrote on X, “Britney Spears will release her new single, ‘Selfish,’ this Thursday, January 25th.” The ruse became a running joke on the platform, prompting Spears’ Femme Fatale bonus track “Selfish” — which is 13 years old — to jump on the charts. On the morning of Jan. 26, the obscure Spears track had cracked the top 5 on U.S. iTunes. By that afternoon, it overtook Timberlake’s new release and claimed the number 1 spot on U.S. iTunes.

Another Spears stan page, BritneyxYtube, spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the lark’s surprising achievement, clarifying that the whole thing “started as a joke” in response to Timberlake’s single.

“Then we all joined in, saying that Britney Spears was coming back with a 'brand' new song," BritneyxYtube told the outlet. "I still can't believe that it became so big, and we see the results we see now."

The account added, "We are all so happy to see her song making a come back after all these years!!!"

In the early 2000s, Timberlake and Spears had a rocky relationship, which she touched on in her 2023 memoir The Woman In Me. Per Spears, they both cheated on each other — though when Timberlake released “Cry Me A River” after they broke up in 2002, he seemed to put all the blame on Spears.

“I’ve been scorned. I’ve been pissed off. I wrote ‘Cry Me a River’ in two hours. I didn’t plan on writing it,” Timberlake wrote in his 2018 memoir Hindsight: & All the Things I Can’t See in Front of Me, per Us Weekly. “The feelings I had were so strong that I had to write it, and I translated my feelings into a form where people could listen and, hopefully, relate to it. People heard me and they understood it because we’ve all been there.”

Timberlake’s previously apologized to Spears. In 2021, the “SexyBack” singer got heat after clips of “Cry Me A River” and interviews of him talking about his sex life with Spears resurfaced. At the time, Timberlake apologized to his ex on Instagram.

“I've seen the messages, tags, comments, and concerns and I want to respond,” he wrote at the time. “I am deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right. I understand that I fell short in these moments and in many others and benefited from a system that condones misogyny.”