Numbers on the Board (Feb 2025)

My favorite Kendrick meme of February 2025.

“Numbers on the Board” is a monthly column inspired by Walt Hickey’s Numlock News, adapting that format for the music business. A dive into the numbers headlining and defining stories of interest.

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Grammy Reflections

15.4m viewers

Per a few sources (Hollywood Reporter in this instance), Grammy viewership dipped in 2025:

“Sunday’s CBS telecast of the 67th Grammys drew 15.4 million viewers, according to same-day ratings from Nielsen. That’s down about 10 percent from the 17.09 million who watched the 2024 show, which set a post-pandemic high for the Grammys.

While the on-air numbers are off year to year, CBS says the Grammys delivered the most social media traffic ever for a TV broadcast, according analytics firm Talkwalker’s social content ratings. The show recorded 102.2 million such interactions, more than any single program (including Super Bowls) ever has.”

It is hard to know what to make of this dip. The show, by all accounts, has improved. It now fully embraces the fact that it is a concert and variety show first and notionally a night for honoring craftspeople and artists second. Argue this if you like, but compare the Grammy’s and the Oscars. At the Grammy’s, 70 awards are handed out before the telecast, covering a broad swath of genres and craft categories deemed unworthy for TV. At the Oscars, someone who sat in a dark room recording rulers thwacking into watermelons to make the sound of Timothee Chalamet hitting Austin Butler for the latest Dune movie is going to win an Oscar for sound design and get to speak on the same stage as Adrian Brody likely will later on in the night. One is about the spectacle, the other is about what it means to make a spectacle from top to bottom.

Furthermore, this years Grammy’s were as star-studded as ever, driven simultaneously by a generation of rising stars like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan and the long shadow of an aging but perhaps increasingly potent group of stars including Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, and the Weeknd.

I have read conjecture that the Grammy’s limited their advertising this year in deference to mournful post-fire mood in Los Angeles and the music industry that orbits around it. That’s one solid theory. As ever, the simplest answer may be the right one: We’re all distracted, consuming more media and consumed by more devices than at any point in human history. It’s possible people were just more distracted this year than they were in 2024.

35 wins, 99 nominations - Beyonce dominates the Grammy’s

Beyonce’s Grammy supremacy extended to unprecedented heights this year as she secured three more wins (among her record 99 nominations), finally snagging the Album of the Year crown that had eluded her for years. Beyonce is so far ahead of her competition at this point, it is hard to imagine any of her peers catching her so long as she stays motivated to put out albums and make bold, sweeping statements with her music.

5 for 5 - Kendrick Lamar sweeps

When Kendrick Lamar was announced as the Super Bowl halftime performer last September, I felt pretty certain he would win Record of the Year at the Grammy’s. I saw that announcement as a kind of implicit signal that “Not Like Us” had vaulted him to a new level of superstardom, beyond the confines of being “merely” a big rap song into a broader cultural force.

I did not think Lamar would win every category in which he was nominated for a song that, as has been repeated countless times by countless people, makes its most memorable moments out of accusing the other biggest rapper in the world of being a pedophile.

When you combine Kendrick’s Grammy sweep (bringing him to 22 wins and 57 nominations, slightly higher than the rate at which Beyonce wins Grammy’s with 38.5% to her 35%) with the fact that his halftime performance was viewed by 133,500,000 people and that “Not Like Us” returned to number one on the Billboard charts for its third non-consecutive week, subsequently remaining in the top five of the same chart a week later alongside three of Lamar’s other singles (“TV Off,” “Squabble Up,” and “Luther”), his last year must be placed in the pantheon of the most dominant in rap history. Off the top of my head and in no order, those would have to include: 50 Cent’s 2003, DMX’s 1998, Eminem’s 2000, Lil Wayne’s 2008, Snoop Dogg’s 1993, Future’s 2015, Kanye West’s 2010, and a tie between the Beastie Boys and Run DMC’s 1986. Kendrick now has to be mentioned early in any conversation about critical and commercial dominance, a fact punctuated by a halftime performance that foregrounded his latest album GNX as if to say “I am in my prime right now,” whether 133,500,000 people agreed with that or not.

0’s and 1’s -Taylor and Billie win nothing, while Chappell and Sabrina each score one important nod

A quick anecdote. 2 years ago when I attended the Grammy’s, I guessed the first 8 award winners correctly. When Beyonce won for Best Dance Album, I turned to my wife and said it would be a free for all from there and I had no idea who would win what. A bit of a copout, but I was correct. Each of the following awards was won by a different artist, few of whom were the clear favorites. Watching last year’s Oscars, I guessed 19 of the 23 award winners correctly. I take nominal pride in my ability to divine the outcomes of these shows even when I haven’t necessarily listened to all the music or watched all the movies.

This year I would have had Kendrick right for Record of the Year and Chappell Roan for Best New Artist, but man oh man would I have absolutely bombed many of the other big categories. I surely would not have guessed that perennial Grammy favorites Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish would leave empty handed (in the Grammy sense, and not in the sense of their extraordinary lives).

I am glad that Chappell and Sabrina each won an award, signaling that Grammy voters at last seem to have an eye towards the artists making the biggest impact in the current pop music crop, both culturally and in terms of hit song craft.

3113 words - Lucian Grainge’s New Year’s Memo

In response to Lucian Grainge’s annual letter, which touts a further commitment to Universal Music Group’s “artist-centric” strategy, a story.

I work with an artist who was signed to a UMG-owned label for several years. The artist spent quite a long time working on their debut album, protected for over half a decade by A&R’s and senior executives who understood their importance to the label on a number of levels even though they had never delivered music for release.

We survived through numerous regime changes, new philosophical directions for the larger UMG beast, UMG going public, and constant creative stops and starts of our own to determine the direction of the album. Through it all, my client crafted an album they were proud of, in large part due to their insulation from the vicissitudes of the major label system.

Sometime in mid-2024, long after we had turned in a fully mixed and mastered album, it became evident that plans we’d laid out would no longer be feasible. The corporate restructurings that rippled through UMG more broadly seemed to now be directly affecting our ability to get the album finished and scheduled. We needed to get off the label and find a new home for the project. Good standing and long relationships with the team in charge enabled us to negotiate an amicable exit and walk with our sound recordings. All we owed the label was a small royalty from future exploitation of the album, a fee referred to as an override that is completely reasonable and common in this sort of situation. We were fortunate.

Or so we thought. Weeks after I had struck an agreement to the person in charge of the label, the client’s lawyer received a call from the label’s lawyers saying that we would not, in fact, get our sound recordings back. That UMG’s new policy was not to return sound recordings back to artists released from their subsidiary labels as they had found it too onerous to get paid on negotiated overrides. We were told the recordings would remain with the label, never to be released or exploited in any real way, perhaps other than as a debt asset to be used for tax relief (my assumption, not their words). We eventually got our sound recordings back, but it was not without much hand wringing and being told that this sort of thing was being granted to us as an exception.

I applaud UMG’s efforts to bring AI companies like Suno and Udio to heel through lawsuits, even though I assume that their ultimate goal is to own a piece of each (or acquire the one the view as the “winner” in the generative music AI race outright) rather than beneficently protecting artists’ copyrights. I also think UMG is the only major label group capable of pushing for more favorable rates from streaming companies and digital platforms like Spotify, Amazon, and TikTok, not to mention key copyright protections enshrined in law. UMG and its chief executives are key forces in lobbying for fairer compensation both within the structures of the industry and in the wider American political apparatus. I have also seen first hand what one might call an “artist-centric” approach in the way many of my clients have been treated by Universal Music Publishing Group, UMG’s publishing company which has become a hub for truly great artists, producers, and songwriters since Jody Gerson became chair and CEO in 2015. I have experienced the best sides of UMG. I understand its strength. Its dominance in music is undeniable and that is in no small part due to the fact that Grainge has largely empowered the labels he oversees to sign groundbreaking and genre-defining talent time and again.

When I read Grainge’s assertion that UMG is “not a financial institution that views music as an ‘asset,’” I cannot help but think of my recent experience where corporate policy made art into an asset plain and simple. Of course, our experience is ours alone, but it feels indicative of a larger re-orientiation designed to protect UMG’s catalog war chest, with copyright as its greatest defense mechanism to date in the wars against streamers, digital platforms, and competitors. It would be more accurate to refer to this strategy as “catalog-centric,” but that lacks the human warmth of calling a publicly traded corporation’s core ethos “artist-centric.” (The same could be said of Uniport, UMG’s payment system, hated by anyone who has ever tried to extract payment from one of the company’s subsidiary labels.)

$450m - Warner buys controlling stake in Tempo Music

If you ever wondered what the point of all these new catalog buying companies is, one of the quickest and most compelling answers: To buy enough stuff to turn around and sell to someone who can write a nine figure check.

You will see more deals like Tempo Music selling a controlling stake to long term partner Warner Music Group (which helped with Tempo’s initial fundraise and launch in 2019). There will be deals from companies you’ve likely never heard of (like Goldstate Music buying CatchPoint Rights and AMR Songs for roughly $200m), and there will be the occasional mega deal involving a bank and a big catalog holder (as evidenced by the Hipgnosis / Blackstone / Concord drama from last year that ultimately ended in the private equity firm that had backed Hipgnosis for sometime acquiring it for a depreciated $1.584b). More likely, you will see the majors attempt to gobble up quality catalog holders in an attempt to buy into proven profitability and greater marketshare.

At the end of it all, there is no real romance here. No custodianship. It’s about gigantic checks.

Act now while copyright law lasts!