Jon Batiste’s five wins at the Grammys — and a galvanizing performance on the telecast — sparked a lot of interest in further checking out his music online, as his music enjoyed a 950% increase in streaming following Sunday night’s show.
Numbers from Luminate Data (formerly MRC Data) provided to Variety show just how sharp an uptick Batiste enjoyed after winning the most awards of anyone nominated this year, including the album of the year prize.
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In the two days prior to the telecast, Batiste had a total of 307,400 on-demand audio streams. On the day of the show and the following day, his tally for those 48 hours added up to 3,227,300, the difference being a 950% bump.
The increase in interest in Batiste really showed up on Monday, the day after the CBS and Paramount Plus telecast. His music got streamed on-demand 2,690,200 times on Monday — more than five times as many as the 537,100 he picked up on Sunday, the day of the show.
And either of those days was way up from what he’d been experiencing in the days leading into the show. On March 30, his daily streams maxed out at a very modest 110,900, and while they trended slightly upward in the three days that followed that, they stayed in the 100,000s until the day of the Grammys.
If you look at his 110,900 four days before the Grammys and his 2,690,200 the day after the Grammys, that’s about a 25-fold increase in daily streaming totals.
Inevitably seeing a big increase among individual Batiste songs was his single “Freedom,” nominated for record of the year, which he performed on the Grammy telecast at the completion of a medley. That song was up 1046% in streaming from the two days before the show to the Sunday-Monday frame that included the telecast. But it was the title song of his winning album, “We Are,” that got the biggest boost between those time frames, up 2045%.
Song sales were also up dramatically for Batiste. The difference between his sales in the four days before the Grammys and the four days after was a 2544% increase.
Individual track sales are, of course, a minimal factor in artists’ income versus streaming these days, but it’s still a strong indicator of interest. Batiste was only selling 100-200 tracks a day in the four days leading up the Grammys. But he sold 3,500 on the day of the show and 4,000 on Monday.
How did Silk Sonic fare in the marketplace after the Grammys? That super-duo did not win quite as many Grammys as Batiste — four to his five — but did have bragging rights to sweeping all four categories they were up for (albeit coming within a single vote of losing in one division that ended in a tie).
The answer is that Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak got a nice bump, too, albeit not as dramatic as the one Batiste picked up, largely because their numbers were already up in enviable territory.
On-demand streams for Silk Sonic music were up 31% in the two day Sunday-Monday period over the Friday-Saturday time frame. The song “777,” which the duo performed to open the CBS telecast, was up more sharply, with a 79% increase. But their signature song “Leave the Door Open,” which won both the record of the year and song of the year prizes, got a nice lift, as well, despite not being played on the show — it was up 46%.
Although Batiste enjoyed the biggest percentage boosts by a long shot, he was not able to catch up with Silk Sonic in total streams. On Monday, the day after the Grammys, Silk Sonic had a total of 3,148,300 on-demand streams, versus the 2,690,200 for Batiste that day. But he sure did a lot to narrow the gap. Because back on March 30, Silk Sonic had been riding high with 1,713,100 streams, versus the mere 110,900 Batiste got that day, leaving Batiste with no competition for a “most improved” award.
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