After Sam Smith bested four competitors for the 2016 best original song Academy Award, he walked away with more than just Oscar gold -- he earned a healthy boost in sales too.
Smith's Spectre song "Writing's on the Wall" -- which sold nearly 4,000 digital downloads in the week prior to the Oscars (sales period ending Feb. 25, 2016) –
sold close to 22,000 digital downloads the week of the Oscars ceremony (period ending March 3, 2016), according to Nielsen Music. That's a 466 percent increase in sales. Not a bad bonus to that gold statue.
Even though Smith won the 2016 Oscar,
Lady Gaga's best original song-nominated single actually experienced a much larger sales boost.
"Til It Happens to You," from the documentary The Hunting Ground, moved fewer than 2,000 downloads during the pre-Oscars sales period.
During the week of the 2016 Oscars, her song with Diane Warren soared to nearly 28,000 downloads -- that's a massive 2,120 percent sales increase. Undoubtedly, Gaga's performance at the 88th Academy Awards -- which found her sharing the stage with dozens of sexual assault survivors and was one of the night's most memorable moments -- helped propel the song to its best-ever digital sales week. According to Gaga's YouTube page, "A portion of proceeds from the sale of the song will be donated to organizations helping survivors of sexual assault."
Both Gaga and Smith outpaced what fellow nominee/performer The Weeknd earned for his Fifty Shades of Grey song. "Earned It (Fifty Shades of Grey)" went from moving nearly 7,000 downloads in the pre-Oscars sales week to slightly more than 15,000 during the week of the Oscars. That's a 131 percent increase -- significant, but not close to what the songs from Gaga and Smith experienced.
http://www.billboard.com/articles/co...ars-2016-sales