Grammy Ratings Surge For CBS With Big Win For Taylor Swift, Big Performances By Tracy Chapman & Joni Mitchell
The 66th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday turned out to be a very good night to be Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Joni Mitchell and Tracy Chapman. As well as delivering for music fans, and allowing Jay-Z to get a few things off his chest, the Grammys turned out to be great for CBS and the Recording Academy.
The live ceremony from DTLA hit a years-long high note with 16.9 million viewers on average tuning in across CBS, Paramount+ and other digital platforms, according to early data from Nielsen. Pulling in the best Grammy numbers ever for the streamer, according to CBS, the show peaked with nearly 18.3 million watching at the 9:45 PM quarter during the In Memoriam segment.
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Snagging the best numbers for the Grammys since 2020, last night’s Trevor Noah-hosted show was up 34% from last year’s audience of 12.4 million, which was a double-digit jump from the low of 2022.
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Much like the CBS-hosted Golden Globes, this is a positive sign for award shows, which largely have struggled to bounce back to pre-pandemic numbers.
Overall, Music’s Biggest Night has seen a nice boost over the past several years after bringing in just 8.93M viewers two years ago and had failed to grow meaningfully year-over-year from 2021 to 2022.
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The 2021 show marked the Grammy’s least-watched iteration ever, though to be fair it was one of the first in-person live TV events during the pandemic and was a scaled-down affair with no audience. And it wasn’t the only awards show to be see its audience take a nosedive during that time.
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With this year’s TV audience, the Grammys is inching back toward pre-pandemic levels, though it’s unclear if it could ever actually get there anymore. The 2020 show earned 18.7M viewers in final numbers, while the 2019 edition raked in 19.9M sets of eyeballs.
Swift won Album of the Year for Midnights on Sunday at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, capping a night where women ruled and a year for the ages for pop’s biggest star. Cyrus was the primetime show’s first double winner, picking up her first career Grammy for Best Pop Solo Performance for “Flowers” then later taking home the trophy for Record of the Year. See the full winners list here.
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