Can you feel the Kenergy?
Ryan Gosling's Oscars performance of the “Barbie” power ballad “I'm Just Ken” stole the show earlier this month. The popularity of his star-studded, Slash-soloing, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”-channeling set is still being felt.
Luminate, the industry data and analytics company, found that on-demand U.S. audio and video streams for “I'm Just Ken” topped three million streams in the week after the Academy Awards. That's a 422% increase from the prior week, when it had 600,000 streams.
Video made up a large portion of that jump: moving from 70,000 streams the week prior to 1.8 million.
That increase was felt across the music of “Barbie,” but in smaller amounts: the full-film's soundtrack, “Barbie The Album,” saw a jump of 23%, from 19 million to 23 million, and the Oscar-winning song, Billie Eilish and Finneas' “What Was I Made For?” saw an increase of 19% across U.S. audio and video streams, from 6.7 million to eight million.
With their win, Eilish, 22, became the youngest person to win two Oscars . The second youngest? Her brother Finneas, at age 26.
The Oscars' “I'm Just Ken” performance — which featured a stage full of “Kens” and Gosling serenading “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig and others — also saw big numbers on YouTube: two million views on the Oscars' official channel and 8.6 million on Atlantic Records' page — the major label that released “Barbie The Album.”
The Oscars themselves saw a bump in ratings , also due to the popularity of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” An estimated 19.5 million people watched the 96th Academy Awards ceremony on ABC, up 4% from last year — and the biggest number drawn by the telecast in four years.
