Grammys Give Imagine Dragons Sales Bump, With Help From Kendrick Lamar
Imagine Dragons may have captured Best Rock Performance at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards but their winning ways don’t stop there: Imagine Dragons is counted among several artists experiencing a post-awards show sales boost.
Entertainment Weekly reports that Imagine Dragons’ hit song “Radioactive” got a 58 percent bump in sales after release of a remix featuring Kendrick Lamar, with whom the Dragons performed a mashup of “Radioactive” and his song “m.A.A.d city” at the Grammys. Despite Lamar not bringing home the Grammy gold himself, he won’t have to worry about any lost any respect from the guys in Imagine Dragons.
“We’re all fans of Kendrick,” Dan Reynolds, lead singer for Imagine Dragons, told Rolling Stone. “We’ve been playing his record on the tour bus. We’re more influenced by hip-hop than most rock bands. I was into 2Pac and Biggie, and to me, Kendrick reminds me of that era. He feels authentic.”
Imagine Dragons are Such big fans of Lamar and have so much respect for the other artists they faced in quest for Record of the Year, they didn’t think they had a chance of winning.
“‘Radioactive’ was a big song. But songs like ‘Blurred Lines’ were huge. If I were a voter, I’d be like, ‘Robin Thicke was at the VMAs with his pin-striped suit, and Lorde is cute — and who are Imagine Dragons? I have no idea what those dudes even look like!’ When that’s the take, you know you’re not going to win that award.”
We’re sure that wasn’t the thought process, even if Reynolds was right about not winning. RS informs us that “Radioactive” gave Imagine Dragons the third-bestselling digital track of 2013, with nearly 5.5 million copies bought (you can imagine the copious amounts acquired by other means).
Of course, not everyone’s a fan.
“Radioactive” also managed to put Imagine Dragons in the cross-hairs of Examiner’s music writer Mark Schiff, who ranked it among his “13 Most Annoying Hits of 2013,” calling it “an annoyingly self-serious song with a great video that feels misplaced.”
“What’s most maddening about “Radioactive” is that it has a truly brilliant video that belonged to a different, more lighthearted song. I had been waiting for someone to make a video about puppet cockfights that features an evil Lou Diamond Phillips for quite some time, and needless to say, Imagine Dragons was not the band I envisioned making it.”
OK…
Still, to receive the kind of homage it got from “American Idol 13” contestant Austin Wolfe, it can’t be that bad…
