🎵 Digital Strategy Audit: The Recording Academy (Grammys)

Executive Summary

Following the strategic decision to split the Recording Academy’s digital presence into two separate domains—Grammy.com (Fan/B2C) and RecordingAcademy.com (Industry/B2B)—this project audits performance metrics to evaluate the ROI of the bifurcation strategy.

The Verdict: The split strategy is VALIDATED. The data confirms successful segmentation of two distinct user behaviors: high-volume event traffic vs. high-engagement professional traffic.

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📊 Project Overview

• Role: Digital Strategy Analyst
• Tools: Python (Pandas), Plotly, Jupyter Notebook
• Objective: Analyze web traffic volatility, user engagement, and device demographics to optimize the FY2026 digital roadmap.
• Key Comparison: Benchmarked performance against the American Music Awards (AMA).

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🔍 Key Findings

1. Infrastructure Risk (The "43x" Spike)

• Observation: Grammy.com traffic explodes from a baseline of ~32k daily visitors to ~1.38 million on Awards Night.
• Impact: This 43x traffic multiplier acts like a DDoS attack. Separating the B2B infrastructure was critical to protecting member voting systems from fan-driven crashes.

2. The "Stickiness" Gap

• Industry Site: High engagement (33.7% Bounce Rate, ~3 mins time on site).
• Fan Site: Low engagement (40.8% Bounce Rate, ~90s time on site).
• Insight: The industry site attracts intentional researchers; the fan site attracts fleeting browsers.

3. The Mobile Opportunity (Gap Analysis)

• Grammys Mobile Share: 68%
• Competitor Benchmark (AMA): 86%
• Gap: 18%. The Grammys digital experience is failing to capture the mobile-first mass market, representing a loss of ~200k potential monthly users.

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🚀 Strategic Recommendations (FY2026)

Based on the audit findings, this report proposes the following high-priority initiatives:

Focus Area	Data Insight	Strategic Pivot	Business Value
1. Infrastructure	43x Traffic Volatility (32k $\to$ 1.3M) acts like a DDoS attack on event nights.	Decouple Servers: Isolate B2B (Voting) from B2C (Fan) infrastructure.	Protects member voting integrity; eliminates crash risk for paying members.
2. Mobile UX	18% Market Share Gap (68% vs 86% benchmark) indicates high friction.	Mobile-First Audit: Fix load speeds and touch targets on mobile.	Recaptures ~20% of lost mass-market traffic (Gen Z/Millennials).
3. Content	Low Dwell Time (90s vs 6m) signals weak engagement.	Sticky Formats: Shift from text news to interactive video archives.	Triples ad inventory capacity & increases programmatic revenue.

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💻 How to View This Analysis

This analysis is hosted in a Jupyter Notebook.

• Click here to view the full audit & code

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Disclaimer: This project is a portfolio demonstration using mocked traffic datasets to simulate real-world digital strategy analysis.