LOS ANGELES – Taylor Swift’s record-setting night at the Grammys drew the largest audience for music’s highest honours since a pre-pandemic show in 2020, broadcaster CBS said on Feb 5.
Television viewership in America averaged roughly 16.9 million people for the three-hour-plus ceremony shown live from Los Angeles on Feb 4 (Feb 5 Singapore time), according to Nielsen data released by CBS. That was a significant increase from 2023 when 12.4 million people watched.
Swift made history during the telecast, winning an unprecedented fourth Album of the Year award with her pop record Midnights (2022), and women swept the major awards. Swift also used the occasion to announce a new album.
Hosted by Trevor Noah, the show had plenty of star power, with Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish and Beyonce all making appearances. Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell dazzled critics with rare television performances.
Viewership of the ceremony peaked during an extended in memoriam segment with performances by Stevie Wonder, Annie Lennox, Jon Batiste and Fantasia Barrino.
In America, TV viewership for traditional television, and entertainment award shows in particular, has been on the decline in recent years as viewers shift to streaming. Audiences dwindled even more during the constrained awards shows put on during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In January, the scandal-plagued Golden Globes notched 9.4 million viewers, a 50 per cent uptick from 2023. The Oscars have had back-to-back increases, with the 2023 ceremony drawing nearly 19 million viewers. Viewership for the 2023 Tony Awards also increased modestly. The outlier is the Emmy Awards, which set a low in viewership in January after a four-month postponement.
The largest audience on American television every year is the Super Bowl football championship, which typically draws around 100 million viewers.
When award show ratings began to go into free fall a few years ago, many industry observers chalked up the decline to exhaustion among viewers – newly accustomed to on-demand entertainment – with 3 1/2-hour ceremonies jammed with five-minute commercial breaks.
Industry executives also said viewers were losing patience with winners’ speeches that became decidedly more political during the Trump administration.
“What happened over the last four or five years, as award shows became platforms for people to put out their own views on topics, some of the Middle America audience that sort of clamoured for that celebrity maybe got tired of the preachiness of it,” Mark Lazarus, chair of the NBCUniversal Media Group, said at an event in December.
Speeches dedicated to political issues were mostly absent from the Grammys telecast, even with former President Donald Trump galloping toward the Republican nomination in the coming presidential election and wars raging in the Middle East and Europe. Political speeches were also virtually non-existent during the recent Globes and Emmys ceremonies. REUTERS, NYTIMES
