Katy Perry eyeing swift return following last year's Witness misstep

Perry's Witness LP - her first since 2013's Prism - barely made a dent in the UK charts, selling just over 16,000 copies in its first week (enough to take it to the sixth place spot). As the BBC note, it's only sold 60,000 in the UK overall... considerably less than the 500,000 that each previous record has hit (and usually surpassed with ease).

The album - which features "Swish Swish" (one of our favourite tracks of last year), "Bon Appétit", and "Chained To The Rhythm" - is actually quite good, but perhaps it doesn't scale the dizzy heights that predecessors such as multi-platinum record Teenage Dream did.

But there's no time to wallow as Perry, her team, and label Capitol Records plan to head back to the drawing board post-haste.

"It’s an interesting story," her label boss Steve Barnett says in a new interview with Variety. "I love her and have forged a great relationship with her. I talk about how engagement is so important and I don’t believe you can have big cycles between projects [as Katy did]. I think that’s changed. And so you sit down and have tough conversations with her and management. As successful as you’ve been, you learn. Personally I’ve learned more from our mistakes than our successes and I believe our artists are in the same category as that. But she has a plan, and we have a plan, and I feel good about it."

Despite the poor sales and lukewarm critical reception, the tour in support of Witness has been largely successful thanks to some eye-catching stage design and the calibre of her overall catalogue.