Miley Cyrus Reaps Benefits of VMAs Performance on Twitter, iTunes
The singer set Twitter on fire and should see a strong chart impact from her attention-getting MTV performance.
Miley Cyrus is reaping the benefits of her buzzed-about performance on Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards — both in sales and social metrics.
On the Aug. 25 VMAs, Cyrus performed her Billboard Hot 100 top 10 single “We Can’t Stop,” and then participated in a medley of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and “Give It 2 U” (with 2 Chainz and Kendrick Lamar).
According to Twitter, the “We Can’t Stop” and “Blurred Lines” medley with Cyrus and Thicke garnered 306,100 Tweets per minute during the East Coast airing of the show. To compare, last year’s VMAs had a peak of 98,307 Tweets per minute, whereas the presidential election night last year saw a Tweets-per-minute peak of 327,452.
The conclusion of Justin Timberlake’s performance on the show was the second-most Tweeted moment of the VMAs: 219,800 Tweets per minute.
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According to Next Big Sound, Cyrus earned 50,000 new Facebook page likes on Sunday — up tremendously from the 30,000 she tallied on Saturday. Comparably, Timberlake’s Facebook logged 122,000 new page likes on Sunday — close to five times the number of likes he earned on Saturday.
Cyrus’ performance came a little over 24 hours after her forthcoming album, “Bangerz,” became available for pre-order in the iTunes Store. At press time, the set ranked at No. 5 on the retailer’s top sellers tally. “Bangerz” is set for release on Oct. 8.
Industry sources say that Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” will likely see a slight dip in download sales for the week ending Aug. 25 — but will perk up the following week. (In the week ending Aug. 18, it sold 148,000 downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan.) The song may generate a gain of 10% to 20% in the frame that ends Sept. 1.
Because the single itself is fairly old — it premiered in June — there is more focus on Cyrus’ new song, “Wrecking Ball.” The cut premiered on iTunes late Saturday night as part of the “Bangerz” pre-order, and is off to a robust sales start. Sources suggest that it moved around 80,000 to 90,000 copies in less than two full days on sale.
Thus, Cyrus will likely end up with two songs in the top 20 on this week’s Digital Songs chart — which will be released on Wednesday, and reflects the sales week that ended on Aug. 25.
Truly, the full sales impact of the show will not be felt until next week — after we have a full week of post-VMAs sales to examine (for the week ending Sept. 1).
The two-and-a-half hour VMAs telecast averaged 10.1 million viewers according to Nielsen — a 66% gain from last year’s draw of 6.1 million. The most-watched VMAs telecast remains 2011’s installment, delivering 12.4 million viewers.
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