Although Mumford & Sons didn’t win a Grammy - they walked away with the breakthru performance of the show. Their story is a reminder that the music industry is driven by artist development - getting an artist in front of an audience and building a fan base. Everything else follows from there.
While a majority of Grammy viewers may have seen Mumford and Sons for the first time, their development (here in the US) started back about a year and half ago. Prior to that, they had already spent a couple of years touring and developing in the UK. Here’s a look at Mumford & Sons growth in the US through a variety of measures.
October 2009-Feb 2010 - The band’s album was released in the UK in October 2009. At this point, US awareness was low - but you can see the US search activity starting to grow (Google Trends; charts below). The US album release was in Feb, where you can see awareness continuing to grow.
Feb 2010-July 2010 - After the album release, there was sustained momentum: album sales held up, the bands social community grew, and site traffic grew. Their single grew slowly at radio along with digital single sales. The band played about 20 tours dates in 500-1500 capacity venues, selling 15k+ tickets. They also appeared at major US festivals (Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Telluride Blues, etc.) over the summer.
Aug 2010-Nov 10 - In August, activity really took off as some traditional, more mainstream drivers kicked in. VH1 started playing the video and featuring the band in their You Oughta Know campaign, which likely have helped drive the radio audience. Across the board, you see a pick up in sales, site traffic, search, streams, etc. The band plays another 18 dates in Oct/Sept, this time in 1,000-3,000 capacity venues, selling close to 40k tickets.
Dec 2010-Feb 2011 - Momentum continued to build thru the holidays and right up to the Grammy’s, at which point their performance introduced to them a much larger audience.
Looking backwards, it’s tempting to look at the growth and think it was inevitable, or forseable, but that’s not the case. This is a really a best case scenario. But it’s still interesting to see the early signs of traction and growth… initially driven by the UK buzz and word of mouth. What seems remarkable is the consistent growth, even at low levels, the trends were always moving in the right direction. What also jumps out is that when the mainstream drivers kicked in it amplified everything that was going on. The VH1 spins and radio airplay weren’t happening in a vacuum - groundwork had already been laid. There’s You Oughta Know artists who don’t connect, and artists who reach much greater radio audience that sell fewer albums. But in this case these drivers had a real impact, as they were a piece of a larger story, not THE story.
There’s a lot of focus these days on the macro trends in the industry, i.e. collapsing CD sales. While this is understandable - it should also be obvious at this point to anybody who’s paying attention. It’s also distracts from the task at hand - which is finding a way forward to sustain the artist development process. One piece of that is sorting out which artists are gaining traction and filtering/amplifying that info to the masses - and it sill seems like there’s a big opportunity to really nail that challenge.
Unless noted, all metrics are US only.
Google Trends (relative scale; up to but not including Grammy’s)
Monthly Site Traffic (in thousands)
Weekly Audio Streams (in thousands)
Not specifically US streams, but you can still see a growth pattern similar to the other trends (YouTube streams were probably 5x-10x this level). Also, Myspace traffic overall was declining during this period.
Digital Singles (in thousands)
Album Sales (in thousands)
Radio Audience (in millions)
Video Audience (in millions)
Community Growth (New Facebook Fans, in thousands)
Tickets Sold
Google Trends (up to and include the Grammy’s)
This includes the Grammy spike. The jump was about the same level as Arcarde Fire, who won album of the year - and considerably higher than the Avett Brothers of Bob Dylan, who Mumford & Sons performed with.
Data from Google Trends, Compete.com, Pollstar, Songkick, Nielsen Soundscan/BDS, Next Big Sound, and estimates.
