How Much Did the VMAs Help the Streaming Numbers for Madonna, Sienna Spiro & More Performers?
This week's Trending Up looks at some of the bigger bumps for Sunday night's participants, as well as revived hits from Paramore and Quavo & Takeoff.
The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) led to notable gains in streaming numbers for several performers, according to early data from Luminate. French house producer GENER8ION and Swedish singer-rapper Yung Lean, whose "Storm" collaboration was nominated for four awards, saw a staggering 443% surge in U.S. on-demand streams following the VMAs, with their song "Storm II" receiving 350,000 streams on Sept. 28, the day after the awards.
U.K. singer-songwriter Sienna Spiro, who won the Best New Artist Moon Person award, experienced a 31% increase in streaming for her latest hit "Great Expectation" the day after the ceremony. Madonna also benefited from the event, with both of her VMAs performances, "Bring Your Love" and "Danceteria," seeing significant gains, with the latter experiencing a 377% increase in streams, up to 214,000.
In an interesting trend, the 2022 "Hotel Lobby" collaboration between rapper Quavo and late Takeoff has surged in popularity due to AI-generated memes replacing the duo with various characters in the style of their COLORS live performance video. This meme-driven trend has led to a 101% increase in U.S. on-demand streams for the song between Sept.
18-24, with 2.95 million streams during that period, up from 1.46 million the week prior. The collaboration is set to appear on Quavo's upcoming album Qrömelife, which drops on October 2.
Written by urgent.news from Billboard's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
