The 63rd Grammy Awards was watched by a live American TV audience of 8.8 million on Sunday night (March 14), down 53% year on year, according to national data adjusted by Nielsen’s time zone.
Those 8.8 million viewers fell by almost 10 million compared to the 18.7 million live viewers that Nielsen counted for the Grammy in 2020.
The numbers also mean that the 2021 edition of the ceremony, presented this year by South African comedian Trevor Noah, was the least watched Grammy ever.
In fact, the 8.8 million viewers attracted to the 2021 program were almost half the audience size of the less-watched edition of the Grammy in 2006, when 17 million viewers tuned in.
In addition, Nielsen reports that the 2021 Grammy had a rating of just 2.1 among those aged 18 to 49.
This rating number indicates the percentage of all adults who watch TV in the United States in this age group who watched the Grammy broadcast on CBS on Sunday.
In other words, only 2.1% of 18- to 49-year-olds in the United States tuned in to Grammy TV on Sunday, while 97.9% of them did not.
In 2020, the number of equivalent demographic assessments was 5.4% and in 2019 it was 5.6%.
The Grammy is not the only recent awards program in the United States to see its TV audience plummet during the pandemic.
Golden Globe audiences dropped 64% to 6.9 million viewers, while the American Music Awards in November attracted just 3.8 million viewers – a 50% decline year over year.
The pandemic could obviously have played a role in reducing the socially distant Grammy TV audience on Sunday. But others will question whether the ratings simply reflect a decline in relevance to the Grammy and other award programs (in their current formats) in today’s world.
Out of Music, Netflix [191 articles]”href =” https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/companies/netflix/ “> Record number of Netflix subscribers in 2020 and record numbers of scripted series viewers for The Queen’s Gambit it certainly adds more support to the argument that the right television content – at the right time – still attracts highly successful viewers.
Not even a performance by the K-Pop BTS superstars, who broke the pay-per-view record for a virtual audience in June for their own Bang Bang Con the Live show, could help the Grammy’s increase its viewership at night.
The real test of fire for the credibility of the Grammy going forward will be the number of spectators drawn for the show in the first edition after the pandemic, in 2022, when there is (crossed fingers) a full audience and a larger production ready to roll.World Music Business