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A couple of years ago we were welcoming the comeback of Katy Perry, the former one-hit wonder quickly turned pop superstar. She returned with the single Rise and one year later with the album Witness. Highly anticipated, the album has now become a comparison point for flop albums. Did it bomb as badly as has been claimed?
Technically speaking, Perry is up to five albums already. I'm going to completely exclude her eponymous debut album released under her real name, Katy Hudson, quite simply because it hasn't sold a thing. Her popular career started with the 2008 set One Of The Boys which contained the smash hits I Kissed A Girl and Hot N Cold.
Often her success has been disregarded because of her relatively weak album sales. As you may understand thanks to the evolution of the music market in recent years, depending on your public target you are going to sell more in one format or another, but it doesn't mean you are more or less successful than another artist. All results must be weighted properly to accurately rate the worth of the singer's catalog. Guess what? That's what we are going to study right now with the American diva.
As usual, I'll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge her results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Perry's albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming, but it will also determine their true popularity. If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, the next page explains it with a short video. I fully recommend watching the video before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the figures.
The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)
There are two ways to understand this revolutionary concept. The first is the Scribe video posted below. If you are unaware of the CSPC method, you will get the full idea within just a few minutes.
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If you are a mathematical person, and want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.
Now let's get into the artist's sales figures in detail in order to apply this concept and define the act's true popularity!
Table of Contents
Page 4: Original Album Sales - One Of The Boys (2008)
Page 5: Original Album Sales - Teenage Dream (2010)
Page 6: Original Album Sales - Prism (2013)
Page 7: Original Album Sales - Witness (2017)
Page 8: Original Album Sales - Comments
Page 9: Physical Singles Sales
Page 10: Digital Singles Sales
Page 11: Streaming Sales - Part 1
Page 12: Streaming Sales - Part 2
Page 13: Remaining Long Format
Page 14: BONUS: Total Album (all types) Sales per Country
Page 15: CSPC Results
Page 16: Biggest Tracks
Page 17: Achievements
Original Albums Sales
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One Of The Boys (2008)
- America
- US - 1,750,000
- Canada - 220,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Brazil - 60,000
- Mexico - 40,000
- Asia - 85,000
- Japan - 45,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 210,000
- New Zealand - 15,000
- Europe - 1,670,000
- UK - 710,000
- France - 220,000
- Germany - 320,000
- Italy - 45,000
- Spain - 10,000
- Sweden - 30,000
- Netherland - 20,000
- Switzerland - 27,500
- Austria - 30,000
- Finland - 5,000
- World - 4,140,000
Original Albums Sales
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Teenage Dream (2010)
- America
- US - 3,100,000
- Canada - 380,000
- Argentina - 25,000
- Brazil - 200,000
- Mexico - 75,000
- Asia - 280,000
- Japan - 165,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 375,000
- New Zealand - 60,000
- Europe - 2,260,000
- UK - 1,275,000
- France - 270,000
- Germany - 285,000
- Italy - 65,000
- Spain - 25,000
- Sweden - 10,000
- Netherland - 25,000
- Switzerland - 27,500
- Austria - 25,000
- Finland - 5,000
- World - 6,910,000
Original Albums Sales
Prism (2013)
- America
- US - 1,730,000
- Canada - 230,000
- Argentina - 50,000
- Brazil - 190,000
- Mexico - 185,000
- Asia - 275,000
- Japan - 105,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 400,000
- New Zealand - 40,000
- Europe - 1,030,000
- UK - 430,000
- France - 155,000
- Germany - 175,000
- Italy - 35,000
- Spain - 20,000
- Sweden - 10,000
- Netherland - 25,000
- Switzerland - 17,500
- Austria - 40,000
- Finland - 5,000
- World - 4,230,000
Witness (2017)
- America
- US - 300,000
- Canada - 35,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Brazil - 20,000
- Mexico - 20,000
- Asia - 47,500
- Japan - 17,500
- Oceania
- Australia - 25,000
- New Zealand - 2,000
- Europe - 130,000
- UK - 35,000
- France - 32,000
- Germany - 20,000
- Italy - 10,000
- Spain - 5,000
- Sweden - 2,000
- Netherland - 5,000
- Switzerland - 3,000
- Austria - 2,000
- Finland - 1,000
- World - 600,000
Original Album Sales - Comments
2008 One Of The Boys – 4,140,000
2010 Teenage Dream – 6,910,000
2013 Prism – 4,230,000
2017 Witness – 600,000
Clearly, considering how many hits each of her first 3 albums generated, those sales are not that as eye-catching as mentioned in the introduction. Teenage Dream still sold a notable 6,9 million, well ahead of the other two albums mostly thanks to the Complete Confection edition.
Overall, their total of 15,28 million represents an average of 5,1 million per album, which itself is enough to make each of them one of the best sellers of their respective years. To highlight the full force of Katy Perry we must look at the complete picture of her results though, the upcoming categories related to singles will show some incredible figures.
In the meantime, her last album Witness pales in comparison to its predecessors, especially since its pure sales were fueled by ticket concert bundles in North America. Will streaming be enough of a factor to make up the difference to its predecessors?
Physical Singles Sales
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
One Of The Boys (2008) - 144,000 equivalent albums
I Kissed A Girl - 230,000
Hot N Cold - 160,000
Thinking Of You - 60,000
Waking Up In Vegas - 30,000
Teenage Dream (2010) - 88,000 equivalent albums
California Girls - 150,000
Teenage Dream - 50,000
Firework - 60,000
E.T. - 30,000
Part Of Me - 3,000
Prism (2013) - 12,000 equivalent albums
Roar - 20,000
Unconditionally - 5,000
Dark Horse - 15,000
Witness (2017) - 1,000 equivalent albums
Chained To The Rhythm - 3,000
Orphan Album - 16,000 equivalent albums
If We Ever Meet Again - 50,000
Rise - 3,000
As with all stars from her generation, Perry sold the huge majority of her singles in digital format leaving very little space for physical sales. As a prime example her debut single, I Kissed A Girl, sold a mere 28,000 CD singles in the UK out of an overall 750,000 units total, less than 4% of its sales. And that's her debut single, the one with the most favorable market context!
Digital Singles Sales
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
One Of The Boys (2008) - 4,643,000 equivalent albums
I Kissed A Girl - 11,810,000
Hot N Cold - 11,790,000
Thinking Of You - 2,130,000
Waking Up In Vegas - 3,620,000
Remaining Tracks - 1,600,000
Teenage Dream (2010) - 9,878,000 equivalent albums
California Girls - 11,060,000
Teenage Dream - 8,490,000
E.T. - 9,040,000
Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F) - 6,530,000
Firework - 12,820,000
The One That Got Away - 4,930,000
Part Of Me - 5,190,000
Wide Awake - 5,590,000
Remaining Tracks - 2,200,000
Prism (2013) - 4,116,000 equivalent albums
Roar - 11,750,000
Dark Horse - 9,470,000
Unconditionally - 2,160,000
Birthday - 1,210,000
This Is How We Do - 1,250,000
Remaining Tracks - 1,600,000
Witness (2017) - 348,000 equivalent albums
Chained To The Rhythm - 1,420,000
Bon Appétit - 330,000
Swish Swish - 470,000
Remaining Tracks - 100,000
Orphan Album - 1,329,000 equivalent albums
If We Ever Meet Again - 2,900,000
Starstrukk - 3,240,000
Rise - 700,000
Feels - 1,450,000
Remaining Tracks - 500,000
Along with the likes Taylor Swift and Rihanna, Perry is one of the leading artists among the digital sellers. Up to an incredible 135 million digital downloads, the most unbelievable fact is that she did so with mostly three album eras. Her main 12 singles from them add for a whopping 108 million. I Kissed A Girl, Hot N Cold, California Girls, Firework and Roar sold over 10 million each, making Perry the only female artist ever with 5 songs past 10 million units sold. Teenage Dream, E.T. and Dark Horse are all fairly close too.
The era of Teenage Dream as a whole is up to a stunning 65,85 million copies, the second most prolific era of all-time in this format, only topped by Lady Gaga's The Fame.
Witness fails to do well in this format with only one million selling song, Chained To The Rhythm.
Streaming Sales
Streaming is made up of two families - audio and video. Our CSPC methodology now includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. As detailed in the Fixing Log article, Spotify represents 132 million of the 212 million users of streaming platforms, while YouTube is pretty much the only video platform generating some revenue for the industry. Below is the equivalence set on the aforementioned article:
Audio Stream - 1500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream - 11,750 views equal 1 album unit
Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = 212/132 * Spotify streams / 1500 + YouTube views / 11750
Streaming Part 1
All these songs pre-date the explosion of streaming. Still, all singles figure among the biggest streaming hits of their respective years.
The overall strength of Teenage Dream continues to impress. At almost 100 million plays on Spotify, Part Of Me is merely the eighth most played track on this record, an absolutely terrific achievement. Firework leads the way with 256 million streams on Spotify and over 1,2 billion on YouTube. Speaking of this latter platform, Perry's numbers there are unreal. Hot N Cold is close to 900 million while all 8 singles of Teenage Dream range from 400 million to 1,2 billion.
In terms of equivalent album sales, One of the Boys amasses 510,000 units while Teenage Dream is now over 2 million confirming its status as one of the most successful albums ever released in digital formats.
Streaming Part 2
Prism hasn't got as many singles as Teenage Dream, but Roar and Dark Horse are more than enough to conclude on mind-blowing totals. They add for a ridiculous 5 billion views on YouTube while granting respectively 368 million and 502 million streams on Spotify. Dark Horse is the 9th song from 2013 over the 500 million mark.
The streaming market has got so big lately that numbers of Witness do not impress. They aren't as bad as expected though. With 754 million Spotify streams combined and 1,8 billion YouTube views, it is closing in on 1 million equivalent album sales.
Perry's biggest hit from 2017 isn't from this album yet as it is her collaboration on Calvin Harris' smash single Feels which has generated over half a million equivalent album sales from streams.
Full Length related record Sales
It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era - studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams - to get the full picture of an album's popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.
All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the value originating from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued, this downgrades catalog sales of the original LP. Thus, to perfectly gauge the worth of these releases, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all the compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains this method.
How to understand this table? If you check for example the The Prismatic World Tour line, those figures mean it sold 175,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 4,413,000 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.
The second part at the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from each original album plus the share it represents on the overall package streams. Thus, streaming figures tell us Prism songs are responsible for 47% of the The Prismatic World Tour tracklist attractiveness, which means it generated 82,000 of its 175,000 album sales and so on for the other records.
BONUS: Total Album (all types) Sales per Country
- America
- US - 6,955,000
- Canada - 865,000
- Argentina - 92,500
- Brazil - 485,000
- Mexico - 320,000
- Asia - 685,000
- Japan - 332,500
- Oceania
- Australia - 1,010,000
- New Zealand - 117,000
- Europe - 5,090,000
- UK - 2,450,000
- France - 680,000
- Germany - 800,000
- Italy - 155,000
- Spain - 60,000
- Sweden - 52,000
- Netherlands - 75,000
- Switzerland - 75,000
- Austria - 97,000
- Finland - 16,000
- World - 15,960,000
KATY PERRY CAREER CSPC RESULTS
So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Perry achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!
In the following table, all categories display figures that way, e.g. in equivalent album sales. For example, singles from Teenage Dream released in digital format sold the equivalent of 9,878,000 album albums - 65,850,000 downloads with a 10 to 1,5 weighting.
As a reminder:
- Studio Album: sales of the original album
- Other Releases: sales of compilations generated thanks to the album
- Physical Singles: sales of physical singles from the album (ratio 3/10)
- Download Singles: sales of digital singles from the album (ratio 1,5/10)
- Streaming: equivalent album sales of all the album tracks (ratio 1/1500 for Audio stream and 1/11750 for Video stream)
Although nobody can doubt that Teenage Dream was heavily helped by the successful extended edition, the overall total of 19 million equivalent units is still impressive. Indeed, this tops Rihanna's modern classic Good Girl Gone Bad album as well as all of Taylor Swift's records. The album is the 3rd most successful album of the decade only topped by Adele's last two outputs.
Both One Of The Boys (9,6 million CSPC) and Prism (10,6 million CSPC) also register notable results. The former record will end up topping the 10 million mark during the next few years thanks to the enduring streaming appeal of its songs.
Witness pales in comparison to its predecessors. It will have no trouble in breaking the 2 million mark, but anything higher seems out of reach in the near / middle run.
The cumulative tally of Katy Perry is up to 43,3 million equivalent album sales equivalent. If her next album reverses the curve of Witness, she will easily get past 50 million overall, else way, she will still do so thanks to her back catalog but that will take several years.
The following pages list her most successful songs as well as her records and achievements. Do not forget to check our amazing cross-artists lists posted inside the CSPC: Data Collector which includes the full listing of all CSPC results compiled so far to better gauge her position in the history of the music industry.
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Chartmasters.org.
BIGGEST TRACKS - Katy Perry
The list of most successful songs is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each of them. It includes the song's own physical singles sales with a 0,3 weighting, its download and streaming sales, and with appropriate weighting too, plus its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.
1. 2013 - Katy Perry ft. Juicy J - Dark Horse [Prism] - 3,660,000
2. 2013 - Katy Perry - Roar [Prism] - 3,640,000
3. 2010 - Katy Perry - Firework [Teenage Dream] - 3,590,000
4. 2008 - Katy Perry - Hot N Cold [One Of The Boys] - 3,490,000
5. 2008 - Katy Perry - I Kissed A Girl [One Of The Boys] - 3,330,000
6. 2010 - Katy Perry ft. Snoop Dogg - California Gurls [Teenage Dream] - 2,670,000
7. 2010 - Katy Perry - E.T. [Teenage Dream] - 2,350,000
8. 2010 - Katy Perry - Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) [Teenage Dream] - 2,200,000
9. 2010 - Katy Perry - Teenage Dream [Teenage Dream] - 2,150,000
10. 2010 - Katy Perry - The One That Got Away [Teenage Dream] - 1,920,000
11. 2012 - Katy Perry - Wide Awake [Teenage Dream] - 1,650,000
12. 2012 - Katy Perry - Part Of Me [Teenage Dream] - 1,510,000
If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC Katy Perry playlist on Spotify!
Records & Achievements
- At 5, Teenage Dream original edition tied the record for most US #1 in the US of Michael Jackson's Bad.
- At 69 weeks, Katy Perry holds the longest streak of weeks with at least one song inside the US Hot 100 Top 10.
- At 5, Katy Perry holds the highest number of 10-million selling digital singles. She is tied with Bruno Mars.
- At 65,850,000 downloads and ringtones, the era Teenage Dream is the second biggest ever in terms of digital singles sales.
- At 19,029,000 equivalent album sales, Teenage Dream is the most successful album from 2010 and third from the 2010s.
- At 10,571,000 equivalent album sales, Prism is the most successful female album from 2013.
Any explanation for the pure numbers being lower than they were for the old article?
Hi Beysus!
Yes, here all main adjustments that have been done on this article:
- (albums) the 300k units of Prism given away by Google Play have been removed
- (albums) The European formula which extrapolates countries outside panel have been adjusted on per new standards for post-2009 albums as identified on Coldplay's article, the reason being that some markets (Scandinavia, Poland) have been almost completely replaced by streaming in recent years
- (albums) Swedish figures have been fixed as they previously included SEA
- (albums) Pure sales / SEA share of UK album sales have been fixed thanks to new data
- (albums) Prism brazilian sales have been increased due to newly (and big) identified codes
- (albums) a few figures (OOTB in Oz, albums in NL) have been changed due to Year End chart positions which have since been mostly converted into sales
- (physical singles) release history of all singles have been entirely retrieved to allow sales from all markets where CDs got issued
- (DLs) ringtones' share has been adjusteed as per exact market evolution, causing mainly increases in sales for her early singles and decreases for singles from Prism
- (streaming) the formula of Spotify has been switched to the updated market share and YouTube have been added
Obviously, this lists fixes, then there is proper updates of figures with new sales / streams and new releases which happened since the first article!
is Witness elegible for gold? is there any chance for it to become platinum by the end of the year?
Hi Gus!
Yes it is, as per Buzz Angle the album closed 2017 with 512,000 SPS in the US without video streams and without downloads/streams prior to the release of the album. Platinum isn't impossible but there is still a long way to go!
Amazing first three album results but yikes what a drop off on the fourth. Not even 20% of the preceding album.
Thanks for the update!
I bet there's a typo for PRISM's Swedish figure.
Also, sales of singles should be broken down, too. Well, not all singles but the top 3 of every artist at the least.
Yes, Witness has been eligible for Gold since December.
Link: https://twitter.com/chartdata/status/945021280792612864
Hi JRVV!
Estimates of her US Ringtones sales are as below:
2,400,000 I Kissed A Girl
1,250,000 Hot N Cold
600,000 California Gurls
500,000 E.T.
450,000 Firework
400,000 Teenage Dream
Remaining songs are all under 200,000 units.
Hi Stan!
You are correct, the typo has been fixed for Sweden! It was only a copy typo inside the article, the figure was fine on Excel so it doesn't impact Europe/Worldwide figures!
Breakdowns would take too long / too much space as there is really a lot of singles + there is both physical and digital figures. In terms of DLs, here are the top sellers in each relevant market:
US - Firework - 7,3m
US (Ringtones) - I Kissed A Girl - 2,4m
UK - Roar - 1,12m
Australia - Roar - 790,000
Canada - Roar - 650,000
Latin America - I Kissed A Girl, Hot N Cold, Roar - 400,000
Japan - California Gurls - 400,000
South Korea - The One That Got Away - 400,000
Germany - Roar - 385,000
France - Firework - 175,000
Italy - Dark Horse - 70,000
Hi MJD! I enjoy all the research you've done on various artists. I was wondering could you do a popularity analysis on Ciara?
It seems both Teenage Dream and Lady Gaga's Born This Way have almost identical pure album sales.
