In 1996, the Spice Girls hit the British music scene and skyrocketed to instant fame. They earned both the adoration and criticism right from the start and were seen as an example of synthetic mass-marketing by the music industry. They didn’t spend years as starving artists and they didn’t write songs. If the Beatles were the Fab Four, the Spice Girls were the Pre-Fam Five. Simon Fuller was the manager and mentor and taught them to embrace merchandising. By May of 1998, their global gross income was 500-800 million dollars.
