This article was originally published on Vulcan Post.
Last week, Spotify and Deezer made their predictions about which musical acts would be winning the Grammy’s — the results of which will are currently being updated here. But it seems they forgot to take into account the effect that simply being nominated had on each of these acts.
Over the weekend, Bloomberg Business revealed an interesting statistic: that whenever a song or record got nominated for a Grammy, the frequency of its streaming also rose on sites like Spotify and YouTube.
It makes sense, when you think about it: the Grammy’s are a huge deal in the music industry, so when a song gets nominated, people take notice. Those who’ve somehow never heard the song before rush to listen in, while fans start playing the record on loop to show their support. Songs which were released earlier on in the year also get more streams, as people try to recall what they sound like.
This phenomenon — which Bloomberg calls The Grammy Bump — however, appears to be getting smaller. This means that while nominated acts are still getting a spike in streams, they spike is getting smaller over the years. It’s an occurrence happening not only on Spotify, but on YouTube as well.
While no definite reason can be given as to why this is happening, Bloomberg suggested that one of the reasons could be the rise in the number of music streaming sites recently. With sites like Deezer (who also released their prediction for the Album of the Year category) becoming more accessible to music listeners, the spike in streams is spread out over a few sites, rather than just Spotify and YouTube.
So while Bastille — Spotify’s prediction for Best New Artist — may not have won themselves a Grammy, they can at least find comfort in the increase in streams they got on YouTube.