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.

How People Listen To Their Music

CBS and Vanity Fair recently conducted a survey about music consumption in the United States that's extremely detailed and interesting. I'll be providing information from that report from time to time in upcoming posts, but let's start off with how most people listen to music.

As you can see from the chart below, the radio is still the way that most people get their music at 49%, followed by a digital music service way behind at 17%.

People still like to listen to songs in their library from a phone or digital player at 15%, 9% still use a CD player, 6% from their computer, and 1% from a record player.

That last figure is surprising in that it's as high as it is. Vinyl has made a comeback, but finding the equipment to play it on isn't all that easy these days. Also, the fact that so many still use CDs shows that the format has a great deal of life left in it as well.