Grammy audience jumps to 16.9 million

Award shows are in their rebound era.

The Grammy Awards drew 16.9 million viewers Sunday night, a 34 percent increase from last year's ceremony, according to Nielsen and CBS, which broadcast the show. It was the most watched Grammy Awards since the 2020 ceremony, shortly before the pandemic — and significantly more than in 2021, when just 8.8 million people watched.

Sunday night's broadcast, hosted by Trevor Noah, had plenty of star power, with Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish and Beyoncé all appearing. Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell dazzled critics with rare television appearances.

Sunday's Grammys ratings are part of a broader trend of viewers returning to live awards shows after several years of declining viewership.

Last month, the scandal-plagued Golden Globes drew 9.4 million viewers, a 50 percent increase from last year. The Oscars have seen consecutive years of viewership increases, with last year's ceremony attracting nearly 19 million viewers. Viewership for the 2023 Tony Awards also rose modestly. (The outlier in this trend is the Emmy Awards, which hit a viewership low in January after a four-month postponement.)

When awards show ratings began to freefall a few years ago, many industry observers attributed it to viewers newly accustomed to on-demand entertainment becoming exhausted by three-and-a-half-hour ceremonies interspersed with five-minute commercial breaks.

Industry executives also said viewers were beginning to lose patience with the winners' speeches, which became decidedly more political during the Trump administration.

“What's happened in the last four or five years, as awards shows became platforms for people to express their own opinions on topics, maybe part of the Central American audience that clamored for that celebrity got tired of the preachiness of it,” Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBCUniversal Media Group, said this at an event in December.

Speeches devoted to political issues were largely absent from Sunday night's Grammy broadcast, even as former President Donald J. Trump galloped toward the Republican nomination in the upcoming presidential election and two wars raged in the Middle East and Europe. There were also virtually no political speeches during last month's Globes and Emmy ceremonies.

The ceremony peaked around 9:45 PM Eastern, with more than 18 million viewers tuning in for an extended in memoriam segment featuring performances by Stevie Wonder, Annie Lennox, Jon Batiste and Fantasia Barrino.