Songfacts®:

• In this song, a woman has been hurt before and is hesitant to jump into a new relationship. The singer assures her that he isn't like those other guys and will be there for her. He says he will wait until she is ready, and then she will choose him.
• 'N Sync followed Backstreet Boys in the wave of late '90s boy bands. Both groups had modest hits in 1997 and 1998, but Backstreet Boys blew it open with their 1999 album Millennium. 'N Sync released their second album, No Strings Attached, in 2000, and it also broke big. The first single was "Bye Bye Bye," which went to #4 in America. "It's Gonna Be Me" came next, giving the group their only #1 hit on the Hot 100. They broke up after their next album, Celebrity (2001), with Justin Timberlake going on to a very successful solo career.
• Like many 'N Sync hits, this was written by a team of Swedish hitmakers, in this case Max Martin, Rami Yacoub and Andreas Carlsson, with Yacoub producing. And if you sometimes have trouble distinguishing between Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync songs, that might be because these guys worked with each of them.
• 'N Sync had a clever visual concept for their No Strings Attached album, with the guys appearing on the cover as marionettes. In the "Bye Bye Bye" video, a girl is pulling their strings. For "It's Gonna Be Me," director Wayne Isham used a variation on this theme, showing the band as action figures in their boxes who come to life and break free.
• Looking back on 'N Sync in a 2010 interview with NPR, Justin Timberlake said: "Everything that we did was based around a cappella harmonies. That's what we wanted to be in the beginning - an a cappella group. So that is why we put five guys in the group. When we were forming the group, there wasn't a boy-band phenomenon. Nirvana and Pearl Jam were probably the top two acts in the world at the time, so we never knew at what capacity everything was going to work out for us. I don't think we thought it was going to be as big as it became."
• In 2016, Fall Out Boy released a video for their song "Irresistible" that imagines the band as dolls similar to the 'N Sync figurines from the "It's Gonna Be Me" clip. The Fall Out Boy dolls end up in the bargain bin, since nobody wants them.
  
  The video was directed by Wayne Isham, who did the original, and features appearances by Joey Fatone and Chris Kirkpatrick of 'N Sync.
• Ever wondered why Justin Timberlake pronounces the word "me" as "may" in the song? Apparently, the strange inflection was requested by Max Martin.
  
  "The parts of their English that were broken actually made them catchier songwriters, because they would put words [in] a way they almost didn't make sense, but when you sang them, they were more memorable," explained Justin on the Hot Ones YouTube show. "But yes, it was a specific note that I got and I was just like: 'This guy is crazy.' But yes, it was a specific note and I did it the way that he requested and that's what made the record."