The Grammy's: Four Ways To Improve Music's Greatest Night

Let’s call the Grammy Awards for what they are - an excellent way to line the coffers of the Recording Academy and CBS and seemingly nothing more. It’s the Super Bowl of music, only without the game, filled with endless halftime performances and commercials.

Even if you followed the 2015 Grammy Awards Broadcast last night, you probably don’t remember or even care about the winners today unless you’re in the music industry. If you were like me, you looked at the clock over and over and thought, “Is it over yet?” But there was always more, and the performances seemed to drone on and on.

I’m not insensitive to how difficult it is to put such a spectacle together, and producer Ken Ehrlich does as good a job as anyone can hope for when it comes to herding celebrity cats, yet in the three and half hours of broadcast time that is the Grammy Awards, it felt that there was about two hours of filler. 

The problem was that the show peaked right at the beginning with a blistering appearance by AC/DC and went downhill from there (although the Ed Sheeran and Annie Lennox performances rose to the occasion as well). If I look at my notes from the show, they indicate long stretches of boredom. If the Grammy’s and CBS want a better show that really does resemble “Music’s Greatest Night,” here are four suggestions to improve the show. See more on Forbes.

Katy Perry And The New Super Bowl Sales Bump

When Katy Perry takes the field to present her 12 minutes of Super Bowl halftime entertainment on Sunday, the reality of what that exposure brings will have changed greatly from previous years. Forget music sales, social media followers, viral music videos or any of the other recent analytics that an appearance of such magnitude usually measures by. Sure, those will still be there, but this time the prime metric of the expected Super Bowl bump will be different. Now it’s all about the sponsorships.

Last year’s headliner Bruno Mars watched his album sales jump more than 160 percent right after his Super Bowl appearance, and his earnings for the year topped $60 million, good enough to place 12th on the Forbes list of richest entertainers. Ms. Perry has already sold nearly 100 million units, and that should increase directly after a halftime of greatest hits (even last year’s guests Red Hot Chili Peppers saw their greatest hits package soar over 400%), but the sales are almost an afterthought to an artist in the current music environment. In the new Music 4.0 world we live in, the music is the marketing, not the product.

While Perry came in 23rd on that same list with $40 million last year, she can expect a big bump in revenue in 2015 thanks to a major increase in her concert asking price as well as a big jump in her sponsorships. What that means is that the overhead involved in any major tour she mounts will diminish greatly with sponsors signing on for big dollars, which is where the real money in music is today. Read more on Forbes.

Audio As The New QR Code

I always thought that the QR code was a rather inelegant clunky idea. The concept behind it was fine, but the execution leaves much to be desired. After all, who wants this ugly black and white splotch on your fine artwork. It takes up a lot of space and adds nothing unless someone happens to go through the motions of decoding it and following the link.

But the idea of an analog link to the digital world is sound, and more and more companies are looking at doing something similar in a different way.

Now comes word that Shazam, the fourth most popular iOS app of all time, plans to let views tag the audio coming from their TVs during the February 3rd Super Bowl broadcast this year. This will let users enjoy somewhat of a "second screen" experience as they watch the game with their smartphones and tablets. In fact, brands plan on giving away plan on giving away over a million items to people who tag the audio during the game.

Among the companies that are participating are Interscope (label home of half-time artist Beyonce), Toyota, Best Buy, Cars.com, Pepsi, Teleflora, Bud Light, Bridgestone, GE, Disney and game company Relativity. Plus, second-screeners will be able to keep up with game stats and polls as the game progresses.

With this type of buy-in for the biggest broadcast of the year, it looks like audio tagging (sometimes called "fingerprinting") is here to stay.

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