There was a lot of heat – and rightly so – on the Grammys this February in the wake of Recording Academy president Neil Portnow last year responding to the #GrammysSoMale social media campaign by saying that women needed to “step up” if they wanted to win more awards. The fact that women dominated the winners this year was poetic justice being dished out gracefully.

Perhaps hoping to prove it was not some archaic establishment locked in a fusty past, the build up to the 2019 event was about digital innovation. Working with IBM, the awards created an AI-powered music universe and discovery platform in GRAMMYconnect.

Drawing on over 14m news articles and biographies of 19,000 nominated artists, the site was able to identify over 20m connections that it hoped would create serendipitous links for users of the site. The whizzy interface lets you pick one act and see the number of times they have been nominated for a Grammy as well as the number of times they have won one. Then by picking a second act, it lists all manner of connections.

(sandbox picked The Bee Gees and Aretha Franklin for the purposes of testing it out and found interesting bits of trivia like they are both winners of the Grammy Legend award and both worked with producer Albhy Galuten.)

Acts can also be filtered by genre – including the obvious rock, rap, pop and dance sitting beside world music, musical theatre and new age – to allow users to really explore the outer parameters of the Grammys world as well as the heavy hitters.

While it’s geek heaven and a wonderful celebration of a wider range of artists, the obvious thing that is missing is… the music. The lack of an API link into a DSP makes it a curiously flat experience. If you are going to celebrate a galaxy of musical greats, making it an audio-free experience seems a massive own goal.