Music downloads may not be dead — at least for a day.
Digital sales of Adele’s Grammy-winning “25” album spiked an astounding 150 percent on Sunday — moments after the singer won Album of the Year, statistics released on Wednesday show.
That compares with an increase of just 10 percent last year when Taylor Swift won the same Grammy for her “1989” album, according to Nielsen Music, which compared sales and streaming volume on Sunday, the day of the Grammy Awards show, to the average rate of the two previous days.
Digital downloads have been falling in recent years as music lovers migrate to streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and Pandora.
Downloads of the Adele single “Hello,” which won Record of the Year, saw a Grammy day increase of 308 percent. That’s up from a 71 percent increase achieved by Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” which won the same award in 2016.
“It’s amazing how fast a performance and downloads work together,” said David Bakula, senior VP of analytics at Nielsen Entertainment. “Having a hit performed that people haven’t heard in years is like putting gas on the fire.”
Overall, the songs performed on the Feb. 12 Grammy broadcast enjoyed a 207 percent gain in same-day downloads, to 178,000.
The Time’s tribute to Prince generated a 1,837 percent increase in download sales for “Jungle Love” and a 4,180 percent increase for “The Bird,” statistics show.
Not surprisingly, streams of Prince’s music, which became widely available only on Saturday, showed an incredible boom. Bruno Mars’ “Let’s Go Crazy” tribute to Prince lifted streams of that song 11,264 percent.
This year’s Grammy viewership of 26.05 million on a Sunday night was 1.1 million higher than the total tuning into the broadcast on a Monday night last year.
The weekend airing could have played into the increases in streams and downloads.
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