Artists Sing and Grammys, Talk? Listening to the Social Media Conversations Around the 66th Grammy Awards.

Sunday, February 4^th was the day of the 66^th Annual Grammy Awards, a ceremony dedicated to celebrating and honoring the accomplishments of those in the music industry from the year prior. With surprise appearances, album announcements, and more, there was certainly a lot to be discussed on social media. Generally speaking, across all platforms since Sunday morning, the Grammys were mentioned over 3 million times with a reach to over 33 billion users across the world. Obviously, as that far exceeds the world population and accounting for the fact that not everyone uses social media, it can be inferred that many people were interfacing with Grammy related content across more than one of their preferred social media platforms. 

The posts surrounding the Grammys were about 70% positive and 30% which, interestingly enough, falls very close to the same sentiment split regarding posts made during the same time frame about Taylor Swift who won the Album of the Year award and announced her new album coming out later this year, The Tortured Poet’s Department. Taylor also made history by breaking the record for most Album of the Year wins.

Other main topics of discussion connected to the Grammys aside from Taylor Swift included other artists such as Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey. Posts about Miley Cyrus were overwhelming positive sitting at just over 90% as she had many notable moments throughout the ceremony’s broadcast. First, she showed up on the red carpet in a gold mesh dress where she was surprised to see the press using iPhones for photography. Second, she won her first ever Grammy for her hit song Flowers. And third, she performed a rendition of Flowers with several ad libs celebrating her night. 

On the other hand, the sentiment around Lana Del Rey was split about 60% positive and 40% negative as fans were unhappy that she was still unable to win her first Grammy.

Looking into the demographics behind the Grammy discussions, conversations were primarily taking place on X which further featured mostly users from the United States which makes sense as The Grammys are an American awards show. Men and women had near equal voices in the conversations though the women were slightly more vocal. Some of the top influencers in the conversations were news organizations such as CNN, The New York Times, and the pop culture focused account Pop Base. Alongside these users the most frequent hashtags were all Grammy focused such as #Grammys and #Grammys2024, but the most popular non-Grammy hashtag was #TaylorSwift which speaks to the impact that she left on the broadcast.

Other notable moments of conversation from Sunday night included Jay-Z questioning the academy as to why his wife Beyoncé has never won the Album of the Year award which was more negatively (about 53%) than positively and Tracy Chapman’s return to the public spotlight to duet with Luke Combs which was almost completely positively received (almost 93%).

Compared to last year, the Grammys were mentioned about half a million times less and reached about 3 billion less users with a very similar 69% positive 31% negative sentiment split. Looking to next year and the years to come, will Beyoncé ever win Album of the Year? Will Taylor Swift win Album of the Year again? Will Lana Del Rey ever win a Grammy? No matter what happens going forward one thing is certain: people are going to have something to say, and they’re going to say it on social media.

Author: Ben Katarzynski