Through the Grammys, the Recording Academy seeks to recognise excellence in the recording arts and sciences and ensure that music remains an indelible part of our culture.
When the world’s top recording stars crossed the red carpet at the 66th Annual GRAMMY Awards, IBM was there once again.
This year, the business challenge facing the GRAMMYs paralleled those of other iconic cultural sports and entertainment events: in today’s highly fragmented media landscape, creating cultural impact means driving captivating content across multiple digital channels.
Not an easy task when you need to celebrate the achievements and stories of more than 1 000 nominees across nearly 100 categories.
That’s why the Recording Academy partnered with IBM to build a content supply chain that would save hundreds of hours of research, writing and production time while offering creative flexibility and easy review.
Powered by the generative capabilities of IBM watsonx, the system provides engaging insights about the personal lives and accomplishments of popular GRAMMY-nominated artists.
This year’s solution used watsonx to leverage a powerful large language model (LLM) hosted in the watsonx.ai component. The model was trained on the Recording Academy’s trusted, proprietary data, which includes artist biographies and stories from the Grammys website and archives, along with their brand guidelines.
Through an AI Content Builder dashboard, the Recording Academy could use natural language prompts to generate a wide variety of content that could then be published to the grammy.com website or used in social media posts.
Intelligently automating social asset creation
The Recording Academy needed to scale its social media coverage to connect with fans and promote the event in the leadup to the Grammys and on the night of the awards ceremony.
But until now, content production had been highly manual and laborious. The solution: AI Stories with IBM watsonx.
Through the AI Content Builder dashboard, the editorial team could easily and quickly create rich assets to be shared in formats such as TikTok videos, Instagram stories or Facebook reels.
The AI Stories interface lets editorial team members choose templates that feature nominees or categories with a variety of layouts and branding, using approved images from the Recording Academy’s asset library. Next they select an artist or award category to feature, the subject of the post, such as biographical information, Grammy achievements, or philanthropic causes, and any topics to exclude from the output.
The user then clicks the “generate” button. AI stories are created featuring introductory text, headlines, bullets, one-liners, and wrap-up texts such as questions and calls to action. Any of these outputs can be regenerated to create alternate phrasings and can easily be manually edited.
Upon clicking “publish,” the text is rendered on to a video asset and prepared for download and subsequent publishing.
Enhancing the digital experience, live
The spectacle of the Grammy Awards show extends beyond the network broadcast. Fans from around the world also tune in to a variety of livestreams on grammy.com, including the Premiere Ceremony (where the majority of category winners are recognised), Grammy Live From The Red Carpet, behind-the-scenes backstage moments, stars arriving on the “limo cam” and more.
This year, an “AI Stories with IBM watsonx” widget appeared beneath the livestream, featuring informative text-based content related to the artists and categories being awarded.
The editorial team created these insights through the AI Content Builder dashboard, using a similar interface as for social asset creation. The default view of the widget features short headlines and factoids, but fans can click through to read more.
“In previous years we provided one or two insights per artist, but this year the widget lets fans dive much deeper and read more about their favourites,” says Tyler Sidell, technical program director: sports and entertainment partnerships at IBM