Beyoncé, accepting the Greatest R&B Efficiency award through the 63rd annual Grammy Awards held in Los Angeles in March 2021.
Kevin Winter/Getty Photos
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Kevin Winter/Getty Photos
Beyoncé, accepting the Greatest R&B Efficiency award through the 63rd annual Grammy Awards held in Los Angeles in March 2021.
Kevin Winter/Getty Photos
The Grammy Awards — billed as “Music’s Largest Evening” — will get underway Sunday afternoon, when dozens of excited winners will step as much as the rostrum to gather their prizes. Later, a lot of massive names are scheduled to look on a glitzy reside telecast. However what do the Grammys actuall imply to nominees and winners, moneywise?
The frontrunner within the Grammy race this yr is Beyoncé. She’s up for 9 awards, together with three of the night time’s most vaunted honors: Report of the Yr, Music of the Yr, and Album of the Yr. If she wins 4 Grammys this yr, she would stroll away with extra awards than anybody since this honor was based 65 years in the past. (The present document holder is the late classical conductor Georg Solti, who received 31 trophies.)
Having stated that: Beyoncé is in a realm of her personal — it would not appear possible that any extra or fewer Grammys are going to maneuver the needle for her, when it comes to revenue. (Bragging rights, positive.) Because it stands, she’s already the feminine artist with essentially the most Grammys in historical past. She simply introduced an upcoming tour that’s already promoting out instantaneously as tickets are launched. Final month, she did a one-hour non-public present in Dubai for which she was reportedly paid $24 million.
For artists and business employees who usually are not fairly in that stratosphere, nonetheless, successful a Grammy can nonetheless matter each when it comes to enhancing reputations and lining financial institution accounts.
The variety of Grammy Awards fluctuates fairly usually. New classes are launched; much less well-liked classes get streamlined and generally phased out. This yr, the Recording Academy, which is the non-profit group behind the Grammys, is giving out awards in 91 classes. Lots of the nominees work in area of interest genres and areas of the enterprise, from blues to reggae to writing the most effective liner notes.
For these people, having that Grammy seal of approval continues to be a door opener. It may well entice new audiences and generate future gigs; streaming and gross sales go up. Artists signal new recording offers or partnerships with extra influential managers. The “Grammy bump” is actual.
Take, as one instance, Megan Thee Stallion. In 2019, her profession was nonetheless percolating. She had her first main hit that yr with “Scorching Lady Summer season;” later within the yr, when she stopped by NPR to carry out a Tiny Desk live performance, it was the very first time she had ever labored with a reside band in public.
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There is a case to be made that her profession, which was already on the rise, actually took off after she received Greatest New Artist on the 2021 Grammy Awards. She was the primary feminine hip-hop artist to win that prize in additional than twenty years; nobody had managed it since Lauryn Hill did in 1999.
Hip-hop followers knew Megan already, however her Grammy wins, which additionally included
Greatest Rap Efficiency and Greatest Rap Music that yr, meant that she was instantly on a wider radar. By the top of the night time of the Grammys telecast, her digital album gross sales had been up 178% over the day earlier than, per Billboard. By the top of that yr, she had signed a first-look manufacturing cope with Netflix.
Final yr, a lot of people had been shocked when bandleader and composer Jon Batiste took dwelling Album of the Yr, the most important prize of the night time, together with 4 different awards. Many longtime Grammy watchers have stated that his win was unsurprising as a result of his album We Are hit a number of candy spots for the standard Grammy voters. Even so, his work was new to many music followers. In accordance with Billboard, his album gross sales skyrocketed greater than 2,700% instantly following his Grammy wins.
Traditionally, there have been circumstances the place a Grammy win didn’t assist an artist in any respect. There’s an previous joke that the Greatest New Artist award is definitely a curse — and that trop dates again approach earlier than Milli Vanilli received in 1990 after which had been uncovered as fakes. With the long-term successes of more moderen winners like Adele, Probability the Rapper and Billie Eilish in addition to Megan Thee Stallion, possibly that period is behind us.
