The super sexy Katy Perry, who made fame with her flirty
lesbian romp “I kissed a Girl” hit, has returned, and
has cemented her status as a best-selling pop superstar with her
second studio album Teenage Dream, which debuted at No. 1
on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart, scanning
192,222 units in its first week of release. Katy is now one of
the top 10 artists with the best- selling debuts of the year and
one of only two pop artists to appear on this list. Teenage
Dream is the two-time Grammy Award nominee’s highest
album chart bow yet. Katy’s debut album, One of the Boys,
scanned 46,767 units in its first week.
Katy has now achieved the highest pre-album street date track
sales of all time, with 4.4 million digital tracks sold prior to
the album’s release — setting a Nielsen Soundscan-era
record. 445,746 total tracks were sold during Teenage
Dream’s first week of release. In addition, with the
Top 5 chart positions of the album’s first two singles, the
six-week No. 1 "California Gurls" and "Teenage Dream," Katy has
become one of only ten female artists in history to have two
songs in the Top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same
time. Currently Katy has 12 songs charting on the Soundscan
Current Digital Tracks chart simultaneously including Teenage
Dream album tracks "Firework", "Peacock" and "Last Friday
Night (T.G.I.F)".
Katy is a pioneer in the new digital world of pop superstardom,
where success is measured not just by album sales, but also by
sales of digital singles, ringtones, and music videos (clips for
both "Teenage Dream" and "California Gurls" have remained
in the iTunes Top 10 Music Videos chart for weeks). Measured in
"TEA"’s (industry parlance for "track equivalent albums,"
in which the sale of 10 digital singles is counted as the sale of
one album), Teenage Dream, plus individual tracks sold,
totals the equivalent of nearly 720,000 albums sold by the end of
Katy’s first week. This follows on the heels of One of the
Boys, which has sold five million copies worldwide.
Teenage Dream has easily averted the usual sophomore
slump, with MTV.com opining that it is "the best second effort in
pop music history." USA Today raves that "the ambitious
brunette serves up percolating confections laced with saucy humor
and disarming earnestness," while Rolling Stone has called
Teenage Dream a "pool-party pop gem." The Hollywood
Sentinel declares Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream is
"pop star brilliance that at first seems dismissible, but
underneath the candy coating, lies sheer genius with bubble gum
packaged rebellion and feminism with a punch."
Katy co-wrote each of Teenage Dream’s 12 songs,
collaborating with a red-hot production team that includes Max
Martin, Dr. Luke, Tricky Stewart, Benny Blanco, Greg Wells, and
Stargate, all leading to some truly masterful mixes. Released in
May, with guest vocals from Snoop Dogg (who also appears in the
video) "California Gurls" spent six weeks at No. 1 on
Billboard’s Hot 100, shattered BDS and Mediabase
weekly airplay spin records, and became the definitive anthem of
Summer 2010.
The Santa Barbara, California born Katy Perry performed on The
Late Show with David Letterman and The Today
Show’s Summer Concert Series during Teenage
Dream's’s release week and recently co-hosted the 2010
Teen Choice Awards with the male cast of Glee. She has appeared
on the covers of dozens of publications, including recent issues
of Rolling Stone, Seventeen, Q, Billboard, the New York
Times’ Arts & Leisure section, and USA
Today’s Life section. Katy has been nominated for two
2010 MTV Video Music Awards for "California Gurls" ("Best Female
Video" and "Best Pop Video") and became a portrait subject for
renowned contemporary artist Will Cotton, whose beautiful
confectionary landscape painting of her (pictured above) graces
the cover of Teenage Dream.
www.katyperry.com