Playing the Ratings Game With Grammy Broadcast

When they take their seats for the 31st annual Grammy Awards tonight at the Shrine Auditorium, the officials of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences will know that their show will probably be only the second- highest rated music-awards special of the year.

In five of the last seven years, the Grammys--the music industry equivalent of the Oscars--have been beaten in the Nielsen ratings by the American Music Awards, a popularity contest that simply measures Who’s Hot and Who’s Not. The gap two years ago was especially big--an estimated 3.4 million households.

Even though the Grammys rebounded last year and out-rated the American Music Awards by a good margin, are Grammy officials embarrassed that the “official” awards program is frequently beaten by a show that enjoys far less industry credibility and media attention?

“Our priorities are considerably different from the AMAs’,” said Mike Greene, the academy’s 39-year-old president.

“The initial television urge is always to come out of the box and just do the blockbuster names and satisfy middle America, and you can get big ratings that way. It’s easy in terms of pre-promoting a television special. . . . It’s easy in terms of staging it and booking it. It’s also very predictable.

“Our intention is to showcase the breadth and depth and diversity of the music family, from an Itzhak Perlman to a Metallica. This show needs to be the window of accessibility for people who may listen to only one kind of music all year long.”

While the American Music Awards (which earned a strong 21.0 rating and 32 share last month) focus on the three areas of music with widest fan appeal--pop/rock, soul/R&B; and country--the Grammys try to represent all fields of music.

So, while last month’s American Music Awards, broadcast on ABC, devoted 15 minutes to a gushy salute to Michael Jackson, tonight’s Grammy show will include performances by such classy non-mainstream artists as classical musicians Perlman and Leontyne Price, jazz greats Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie and gospel groups the Winans and Take 6.

Is this any way to get a rating?

Pierre Cossette, who has produced the Grammy show since 1971, said: “It’s nice to beat the AMAs, but we don’t set out to do that. They do their show and we do ours. They can do more of a variety show, which is why it’s a little bit easier for the AMAs to get ratings.”

Cossette acknowledged, however, that he and the academy’s 12-member TV committee are frequently at odds over what to put on the show.

“We’re always butting heads over what categories to put on and what not to put on,” he said. “They’re protecting the legitimacy of their academy and I’m trying to produce the best possible television show. But I think we strike a good balance.”

In addition to the classical, jazz and gospel segments, this year’s program will feature acclaimed folk/pop singer Tracy Chapman (who is expected to sweep the awards), pop/R&B; stars Whitney Houston and Luther Vandross, Linda Ronstadt singing a song from her nominated album of Mexican music, country hotshots K.T. Oslin and Dwight Yoakam and female rock newcomers Toni Childs, Sinead O’Connor and Melissa Etheridge, among others.

Even at those times when the Grammy show and the American Music Awards draw virtually the same number of viewers--in 1986, the difference between the two was only about 86,000 homes--Greene suggested that the audiences are essentially different.

Greene conceded that the American Music Awards do better than the Grammys with teens and young viewers, but added that the Grammys draw more middle-aged viewers and families.

“Our audience is very much like the show itself--it ranges from 12 to 54, a very broad-based, evenly spread audience,” he said.

The competition from the American Music Awards is only one of the pressures on the academy. One of the Grammy organization’s biggest challenges is trying to cover all genres in a three-hour telecast.

This year, rap-music stars threatened to boycott the show when Grammy officials announced that the new rap category would not be presented on the air.

Bill Adler, director of publicity for Rush Artists Management in New York, which represents rap stars L.L. Cool J and D.J. Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, charged that rap was being “ghetto-ized” and “treated like a stepchild.”

It’s not the first time that representatives of a genre have threatened to boycott the Grammy show when they were denied air time. In recent years and on different occasions, the jazz, classical and Latin communities protested when they felt their categories were being shortchanged.

Greene was philosophical about the problem. “It’s just a matter of time and mix,” he said. “We try to balance the show from year to year so that if we don’t get to a form of music one year we’ll cover it the next.”

Responding to the protests from the rap community, Greene said, “We think they’re important, but we don’t think they’re more important than our Hispanic, classical or jazz communities, or any of the others. We’re able to present only 12 to 15 categories on the air in any given year, which means that at least 10 musical families will be very put out at us.”

While the Grammy show’s booking policy will probably never be as loose as the American Music Awards’--which two years ago aired a performance clip of TV star Bruce Willis, who had released an album--it has begun to be less rigid in recent years.

On this year’s show, for example, jazz vocalist Bobby McFerrin will improvise in a music/comedy spot with host Billy Crystal. Previously, artists were allowed to perform only their nominated songs.

Said Greene, “The predictable thing would be to have Bobby sing ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ What we have in mind is somewhat of a departure, but it gets away from the totally predictable and maybe represents the artist a little better. And that’s what this show is all about: capturing the essence of what artists are all about.”

THE TV AUDIENCE FOR AWARDS SHOWS Here’s a comparison of the ratings and audience shares for leading awards shows in recent years. Given are the average rating followed by the average share of audience for each year’s program.

Show (Network) 1988 1987 1986 Grammys(CBS) 21.1/33 18.3/27 20.3/32 American Music Awards(ABC) 18.1/35 22.2/32 20.4/30 Oscars(ABC) 29.4/49 27.5/43 27.3/43 Emmys (Various) 10.4/18 8.8/14 23.1/36

SOURCE: A.C. Nielsen Co.