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Beck, Annie Lennox get huge Grammy Awards sales bumps

Beck accepts the Album of the Year Grammy for "Morning Phase" during The 57th Annual Grammy Awards.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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Answering the Twitter hashtag mystery “#whoisbeck,” the veteran indie rocker not only came away from the 2015 Grammy Awards ceremony with the coveted album of the year trophy, but his exposure on the show (and additional media fallout from Kanye West’s photobombing of his moment) helped fuel a whopping 483% increase in sales of his winning album “Morning Phase.”

The album shot from No. 39 a week ago on sales of 12,200 copies to No. 8 as about 71,000 copies were snapped up following the Grammy telecast.

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For the Record

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3:07 p.m.: An earlier version of this post said Beck’s album sold almost 723,000 copies after the Grammy telecast. It sold about 71,000 copies.

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Historically, artists featured in the show’s high-visibility performance slots often fare better than many who actually win awards, but in this case, Beck benefited from taking one of the big four category awards (record, album, song and new artist) and got additional camera time in his joint appearance with Coldplay’s Chris Martin.

FULL COVERAGE: Grammy Awards 2015

Percentage-wise, the No. 2 beneficiary was former Eurythmics singer Annie Lennox, whose pop and R&B standards album “Nostalgia” experienced a 335% sales increase after her widely lauded performance on the show of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ 1956 hit “I Put A Spell On You.”

Multiple Grammy winner Sam Smith posted the largest increase in raw sales, however, because his album “In the Lonely Hour,” which previously had still been riding high at No. 4, scored a post-Grammy sales bump of almost 78,000 copies, a 91% increase over the previous week, enough to lift it a notch to the No. 3 slot on the Billboard 200 Albums chart.

Other big beneficiaries of Grammy night exposure were pop music’s odd couple Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, their “Cheek to Cheek” album up 76% over its sales of a week earlier. Mercurial Australian singer and songwriter Sia’s “1000 Forms of Fear” album also logged a 73% sales increase that allowed it to jump from No. 23 to No. 15 last week.

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Sales of Miranda Lambert’s “Platinum” jumped 68%, and AC/DC’s “Rock or Bust” sold 63% more copies than it had the previous week.

PHOTOS: Show highlights | Red carpet | Top nominees | Quotes | Best & worst | Backstage

Ed Sheeran’s “X” album sales rose 44%, and his previous album “+” did even better, increasing 90% from a week earlier, while Irish singer and songwriter Hozier notched an increase of 41% for his “Hozier” album following his duet performance with Lennox.

Pharrell Williams, who dramatically reworked his ubiquitous hit “Happy” for the Grammy show, received a 39% sales increase for his nominated album “GIRL.”

Surprisingly, Katy Perry, who was featured on the show singing “By the Grace of God” from her “Prism” album, saw sales of that album drop 37%, primarily because she’d gotten an even bigger sales bump a week earlier from her halftime show performance at the Super Bowl. Compared to the sales of “Prism” leading up to the Super Bowl, the album’s post-Grammy show sales increased a modest 4.6%.

Follow @RandyLewis2 on Twitter for pop music coverage

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