EMO Girl

Jimmy Eat World's 1999 album Clarity was one of the most significant emo albums of the late 1990s and became a touchstone for later emo bands. Writing in 2003, Andy Greenwald called it "one of the most fiercely beloved rock 'n' roll records of the last decade. It is name-checked by every single contemporary emo band as their favorite album, as a mind-bending milemarker that proved that punk rock could be tuneful, emotional, wide-ranging, and ambitious." However, despite warm critical reception and promotion of the single "Lucky Denver Mint" in the Drew Barrymore comedy film Never Been Kissed, Clarity was commercially unsuccessful in a musical climate dominated by teen pop, and the band left major label Capitol Records the following year. Nevertheless, the album gained steady popularity via word-of-mouth and was treasured by fans, eventually selling over 70,000 copies. Jimmy Eat World self-financed the recording of their next album Bleed American (2001) before signing to Dreamworks Records. The album sold 30,000 copies in its first week and went gold shortly after. In 2002 it went platinum as emo broke into the mainstream.
Drive-Thru Records, founded in 1996, steadily built up a roster of primarily pop punk bands with emo characteristics such as Midtown, The Starting Line, The Movielife, and Something Corporate. Drive-Thru's partnership with major label MCA enabled their brand of emo-inflected pop to reach wider audiences. The label's biggest early success was New Found Glory, whose 2000 eponymous album reached #107 on the Billboard 200 with the single "Hit or Miss" reaching #15 on Modern Rock Tracks. Drive-Thru's unabashedly populist and capitalist approach to music allowed its bands' albums and merchandise to sell heavily through popular outlets such as Hot Topic:
In a world where cars are advertised as punk, Green Day members are platinum rock stars, and getting pierced and tatted up is as natural as a sweet-sixteen party, everyone is free to come up with their own definition of punk—and everyone is ready to embrace it. Emo had always connected with young people—it had just never aggressively marketed itself to them.
Independent label Vagrant Records was behind several successful emo acts of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Get Up Kids had sold over 15,000 copies of their debut album Four Minute Mile (1997) before signing to Vagrant, who promoted the band aggressively and put them on tours opening for big-name acts like Green Day and Weezer. Their 1999 album Something to Write Home About was an independent success, reaching #31 on Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart. Vagrant signed and released albums by a number of other emo and emo-related acts over the next two years, including The Anniversary, Reggie and the Full Effect, The New Amsterdams, Alkaline Trio, Saves the Day, Dashboard Confessional, Hey Mercedes, and Hot Rod Circuit. Saves the Day had built a large following on the east coast and sold almost 50,000 copies of their second album Through Being Cool (1999) before signing to Vagrant and releasing Stay What You Are (2001), which sold 15,000 copies in its first week, reached #100 on the Billboard 200, and went on to sell over 200,000 copies. In the summer of 2001 Vagrant organized a national tour featuring every band on the label, sponsored by corporations such as Microsoft and Coca-Cola. This populist approach and the use of the internet as a marketing tool helped Vagrant become one of the country's most successful independent labels and also helped to popularize the term "emo". According Greenwald, "More than any other event, it was Vagrant America that defined emo to masses—mainly because it had the gumption to hit the road and bring it to them."