With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to an end, Billboard has been looking back on the 25 Greatest Pop Stars of the Past 25 Years. Below, we take a deeper look into the peak of our No. 25 pop star, Katy Perry, and how her sophomore major-label album defined a moment in pop and music industry history, even as that moment was coming to its close.
When Katy Perry’s single “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 in August 2011, it made Billboard history: For the first time since Michael Jackson, an artist had topped the chart with five different songs from the same album. For 14 months, Perry and her second major-label album, Teenage Dream, had dominated the Hot 100, with “California Gurls,” then “Teenage Dream,” then “Firework,” then “E.T.”; the star and her five ubiquitous singles held the Hot 100’s top slot for a combined 19 weeks over that period.
With Max Martin, Dr. Luke, Stargate, and a still-rising young gun named Benny Blanco in her corner, Perry constructed a bulletproof, era-defining pop album – one that topped the Billboard 200 and is today certified diamond by the RIAA. But while Teenage Dream marked Perry’s transition into full-fledged pop superstar and heralded a decade where she’d top the Hot 100 three more times and headline the Super Bowl halftime show, it also represented a broader sea change in the music business and the way audiences consumed music.
“Maybe CDs will be extinct next time I put out [an] album… so I wanted to go out with a bang for people to remember this,” Perry said when she revealed Teenage Dream‘s pin-up-inspired artwork a few weeks before the album’s August 2010 release. Sure enough, by the time she released her next album a little over three years later, Spotify and streaming had become a cornerstone of the music business, YouTube’s viewership had multiplied several times over and Instagram had gone from a soon-to-be-released photo app to a key component of Facebook’s social media empire. The internet had changed – and so had the way listeners digested pop music.
Incidental prescience aside, this was likely not Perry’s headspace in 2010. Even as album sales at the industry’s top tier dwindled from their turn-of-the-century peak, Perry and Capitol Records ran back the tested record release playbook: two titanic pre-album singles to lead a savvy marketing campaign and juice excitement, followed by four smartly deployed singles after the project hit record stores (the sixth, “The One That Got Away,” didn’t top the Hot 100, but was no chart slouch, peaking at No. 3 more than 16 months after Teenage Dream‘s release).
In retrospect, the music is similarly transitional. Teenage Dream epitomizes post-recession, Obama-era pop: big, brash synths and the embrace of EDM; unabashed tonight’s-the-night party vibes; and a few questionable lyrics here and there that wouldn’t make a major pop release today. As much as Teenage Dream was Perry’s accomplishment, it was also Max Martin’s, who co-produced four of its five No. 1s; despite his successful ’00s, today the album clearly marks the start of his ’10s renaissance. In 2010 and 2011, he notched two other No. 1s (with Pink and Britney Spears) along with other massive hits (Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite,” Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love”), and the next few years would bring an onslaught of Martin-produced hits by Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd and others.
Perry’s 2008 singles “I Kissed a Girl” and “Hot N Cold” were the prototype for her Teenage Dream era, in large part because – like “Teenage Dream and “California Gurls” – their credits include the triumvirate of Martin, Dr. Luke and Benny Blanco. Luke and Blanco defined this era, through their work with Kesha and a slew of other artists. But where Blanco is an essential pop throughline from the late ’00s to the ’10s – when he helped craft ubiquitous hits by the likes of Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran – Luke soon became a non-factor, marginalized by the allegations of misconduct against him, although he’d go onto to reignite his career through hits with artists like Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj. (Dr. Luke denied the allegations, from former collaborator Kesha, and countersued for defamation; the extended legal battle ended in 2023 with the two parties settling the countersuit out of court.) Stargate, which co-produced “Firework,” along with several other key singles from the era, also soon faded in influence as the musical landscape of the ’10s settled into place.
But far more than defining the era’s aesthetic, Teenage Dream also captured a music business in transition. For decades, pop megablockbusters enjoyed protracted rollouts where every single mattered – and while Perry worked each of the album’s singles to the hilt, like an ‘80s superstar might’ve, she also applied a distinctly modern sensibility. For instance, on singles Nos. 4 and 5 she added Kanye West and Missy Elliott (to “E.T.” and “Last Friday Night,” respectively), extending the lifespans and commercial ceilings of those singles along the way. Though some industry onlookers cried foul at the time, such chart-boosting maneuvers would soon become commonplace for big pop artists.
Streaming afforded a certain flexibility to artists – by the mid-’10s, the surprise release became the trendy strategy for superstars – and reduced the need for major singles to extend an album’s longevity. Take Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, which continues to dominate the Billboard 200 despite lacking singles with similar commercial legs. (The other side of that coin: Had Perry’s peak coincided with the streaming age, it’s easy to imagine a new album from her charting all or most of its tracks on the Hot 100.) Streaming has fundamentally reoriented how singles interact with the broader pop world – potentially at the expense of the year-plus cycles that made it feel, a little, like a pop artist had truly taken over the world.
Perry’s reign in 2010 and 2011 was among the last of its kind, as the sun set on the era where fourth, fifth and even sixth singles still really mattered. And with every passing year – even as Hot 100 records fall thanks to idiosyncrasies of the streaming economy and modern chart tabulation – her record of five Hot 100 No. 1s from a single album seems increasingly untouchable, like certain gaudy stats from baseball’s dead-ball era. No artist, not even Swift, has even notched four Hot 100 No. 1s from a project since. Still, there’s a reason why even under the old paradigm, Perry was only the second artist to achieve the feat: She had the classic singles to back it up.
