CONTRIBUTOR
This Sunday evening, with some help from Grammy Insights from IBM Watson, the Grammy’s hope to get music artists closer to the fans. The technology was first introduced, albeit differently, at the 2020 Grammy Awards event.
This year, using AI and natural language processing, IBM Watching will analyze more than 20 million news articles, blog posts and sources provided by Grammy.com. Once parsed, the information will be instantly displayed on the screen. According to IBM, Grammy Insights will also be integrated into the pages of specific artists within Grammy.com. The Grammy Awards hopes this will drive more viewer engagement.
For the first time, IBM Consulting is working with the Recording Academy to design, implement and manage its Salesforce-driven digital membership platform. Using pre-built accelerators, IBM was able to speed up the development of a smooth, personalized experience for the 22,000 global Grammy members. The Recording Academy says that it’s been able to increase the efficiency of its staff, improve customer satisfaction and even improve revenue predictability.
“Now, through the deep expertise of IBM Consulting, we’re deepening our collaboration to accelerate the Recording Academy’s digital transformation journey and optimize their business practices,” says Noah Syken, vice president of sports and entertainment partnerships at IBM.
According to IBM, the process provides a comprehensive delivery model that enables innovation, accelerates digital transformation, and makes it possible to move swiftly from idea to business value. The idea is to enable digital teams to shift their focus away from lower-value, higher-volume jobs to more critical processes.
The first time the Recording Academy and IBM turned to AI to create content for the Grammy Awards show was in 2021 when “Grammy Debates with Watson” enabled online fan debates during the show in which fans shared their opinions on the artists.
Grammy Debates with Watson was an AI-curated music debate for fans worldwide and enabled music fans to contribute their points of view to the ongoing music-related conversations. Hosted on Grammy.com, fans debated in 8–36-word count summaries.
The most popular debate at the time was whether Billie Eilish was the biggest style icon in music, and 64% of those participating in the debate agreed. This year, tidbits from the 20 million articles scanned within the past two months will provide insights during the Grammy pre-show and on Grammy.com.
According to IBM, IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding works on-premises or within a cloud and uses deep learning to pull meaning from unstructured test data. The analytics then identifies categories, classifications, entities, keywords, sentiment, emotion, relations and syntax on the information.
Such AI and NLP capabilities accelerate data mining and queries that could take months to sift through. “Once insights have been harvested, the production and curation teams decide which content cascades across TV, social media and digital platforms. As specific high-profile stars arrive, meet with the press and showcase their designer fashions, data will be embedded in red carpet live streams and posted to the artists’ pages on the Grammy website,” IBM says.
Of course, there are still humans involved in the show’s production. To develop the system, IBM worked with various teams within the Recording Academy, especially the IT, marketing and digital teams. IBM says it will also be at the show in support of the editorial and production teams to ensure everything goes smoothly.
