Bonnie Raitt’s ‘Just Like That’ Up 6,700% in Streams After Song of the Year Grammy Win

Few Grammy watchers expected Bonnie Raitt to take home song of the year at Sunday’s (Feb. 5) awards — perhaps least of all Raitt herself, as judged by her heavily memed surprised reaction to the announcement — for the devastating, self-penned title track to her 2022 album Just Like That. The song was easily the least commercially visible of the 10 tracks nominated, the other nine of which were all top 20 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. (Raitt has not reached the Hot 100 since 1995.)

That lack of commercial profile for “Just Like That” to that point, however, has just meant that there’s plenty of curious listeners now intrigued enough by the song’s big Grammy win to check it out for the first time. The song absolutely blasted off on streaming services following its song of the year victory, spiking from just over 10,000 daily official on-demand U.S. streams the day before the Grammys (Feb. 4) to a whopping 697,000 the Monday after (Feb. 6) — a gain of around 6,700%, according to Luminate.

And the growth in the song’s sales is even more explosive. After selling a negligible daily number in the days leading up to the Grammys, the song moved 4,550 copies on Feb. 6, a gain of over 10,000%. (The song has spent most of the week at No. 2 on the iTunes real-time sales charts, behind only Miley Cyrus’ Hot 100-topping “Flowers.”) Raitt’s non-“Just” catalog also saw big streaming increases, with the rest of her discography up from 333,000 official on-demand U.S. streams on Feb. 4 to 869,000 on Feb. 6, a gain of 161%.

It’s not the first time a big Grammy moment has given Raitt a major sales boost. After her mid-career breakthrough set Nick of Time took home album of the year at the 1990 awards, it took off on the Billboard 200 — eventually topping the albums chart for three weeks that April, and starting a commercial renaissance for the veteran blues-rocker that lasted through the first half of the ’90s. Just Like That still has a long way to go before marking that kind of chart comeback for Raitt, but it may be on track to crack the Billboard 200 again next week (dated Feb. 18) — which would be the LP’s first appearance on the chart since it debuted at No. 44 there last May, falling off the week after.

Andrew Unterberger

Billboard