Katy Perry (Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson) is an American singer, songwriter, and television judge who was born on October 25, 1984. Her influence on the pop sound and style of the 2010s has been recognized.
Perry signed with Red Hill Records and released her commercially unsuccessful religious debut studio album Katy Hudson (2001) under her birth name, after singing in church as a child and then pursuing it as a career. After Red Hill went bankrupt, she moved to Los Angeles at the age of 17 to pursue a career in secular music, using her mother’s maiden name as her stage identity.
While signed to Java Records and later Columbia Records, Perry began working on an album named Fingerprints with producers such as Glen Ballard, Butch Walker, and Greg Wells before being dropped. After executive Angelica Cob-Baehler assisted her in signing a recording contract with Capitol Records in April 2007, much of the material from this time surfaced on One Of The Boys.
One of the Boys (2008), Perry’s second studio album and major-label debut, was a pop-rock record that featured her first song I Kissed a Girl, and follow-up single ‘Hot n Cold,’ which respectively reached number one and three on the Billboard Hot 100.
Teenage Dream (2010), a disco-influenced pop album, yielded five U.S. number-one singles—’California Gurls,’Teenage Dream,’ Firework,’ E.T., and ‘Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)’—making it the first solo female artist to do so and tying her with Michael Jackson’s Bad.
Perry is one of the best-selling musicians in the world, with over 143 million albums sold worldwide. She has nine number one songs on the Billboard Hot 100, three number-one albums on the Billboard 200, and numerous awards, including four Guinness World Records, five Billboard Music Awards, five American Music Awards, a Brit Award, and a Juno Award.
From 2011 until 2019, Perry was named to Forbes’ annual list of the highest-paid women in music. Her halftime presentation in the Super Bowl is the most-watched in history.
With over 108 million followers on Twitter, she is also the most followed woman. Outside of music, she published Katy Perry: Part of Me in 2012, an autobiographical documentary, and she voiced Smurfette in the 2011 comedy film The Smurfs and its 2013 sequel The Smurfs 2. Starting with the sixteenth season of American Idol in 2018, Perry began working as a judge.
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