Katy Perry had an album before ‘one of the boys’. She used her real name Katy Hudson and created a Christian rock album. However it failed to chart in any music market and didn’t sell more than roughly 200 copies. She then signed with Capitol Records and created her next album ‘One of the Boys’. Now she is the pop artist that we all know as Katy Perry. From this album to ‘One of the Boys’, we can see a rather large change, mostly from the type of music.

Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream album features her laying on a cloud of candy floss. This links to her video ‘California Gurls’ as the whole video shows a sweets and candy board game. A more direct link is when the video shows Katy Perry on the cloud of candy floss. She has a different hairstyle and is facing the opposite way but they’re the only differences for that scene. There couldn’t be a clearer link between the two.

Music Video

Album

The girls in the video are different sweets. One girl has candy floss on her head.

On this album, there is lots of pink since the majority of the album is covered in candy floss. When we see the music video we see lots of pinks for the different sweets as well as reds and whites which we can see on the album title. In the video we see Katy Perry climb some candy canes which have the same stripe pattern as the title of the album.

Uses red and white stripes

Even her dress is covered in different sweets and colours.

Looking at the rest of the songs on her album, quite a few use rather bright colours or have a lot happening in them. This shows how successful Katy Perry has become at this point since her music videos appear to have higher budgets. 'California Gurls' is both colourful and would have cost a lot to create because of the amount of CGI. 'E.T.' and 'Wide Awake' both use CGI and would have cost a large amount of money to make. 'One of the Boys' was the album before 'Teenage Dream'. The songs on that album don't use very much (if any) CGI. This is a rather large change between the videos for these albums.

CGI for snakesE.T.’s CGI

Wide Awake’s CGI

One thing that hasn't changed between the 2 albums (after her very first one) is her placement in the art work. Her full body is shown in the middle with a large amount of the surroundings shown. In her album 'Prism', she changed to have only the top half of her in the artwork but still shows some of her surroundings behind her. The way her name is written on her ‘Prism’ album is also different to her other 2 albums. This suggest a change in her brand identity for her newest album. Another change in her last album is how she is presented. Her last album appears more mature than her others. This could imply her getting older and more sophisticated than her older albums.

The merchandise made for this album was mainly clothing that features the titles of different songs as well as Katy Perry’s name in the same style as her album cover. The clothes have bright colours, including pink, that shows a link between the album and the clothes. Most of the clothes are very feminine which shows that Katy Perry targets the female fans for most of the clothes.The hoodie in particular shows pink at the bottom and blue at the top. This resembles the album cover as the candy floss is at the bottom with a blue sky at the top. The black top shows some contrast as it’s black and not white but still uses the pink and blue seen on the album so it definitely shows the link. It also has the same font as the album as the writing has drips on it.