For decades, the Grammy Awards have been knocked for being out of step with the times. (After all, the Grammys once awarded “Winchester Cathedral” Best Contemporary [R&R] Recording instead of “Eleanor Rigby.”) But in its 57th year, the Grammy Awards are more culturally relevant than ever.

Consider this: a new report from Taykey analyzed the top cultural trends affecting the performance of advertising campaigns in the fourth quarter of 2014. Taykey wanted to assess the performance of advertising that capitalizes on real-time news events and trends such as the release of the new Star Wars trailer. Well, the top-performing trend for the fourth quarter was the Grammys — months before the actual event was to take place. According to Taykey, the December 5 announcement about the 2015 Grammy nominations was the top trend from an advertising perspective — creating better-performing real-time buzz for advertisers than the release of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies or Ed Sheeran performing on The Voice Season 7 finale.

In fact, brands that created real-time advertising capitalizing on the Grammy nominations generated click-through rates that were 1,145 percent higher than industry benchmarks — easily higher than any other trend by a wide margin.

The obvious question: why? According to the Taykey Real-Time Trend Report, “The music industry may be fragmented and suffering from a revenue perspective, but it’s clear that audiences still care very much about these nominations and their favorite artists.”

Moreover, the Grammys remain the leading destination where music fans can immerse themselves in the fragmented music industry, all in one place, at one time. For instance, at the 2015 Grammys, Paul McCartney, Kanye West, and Rihanna will perform the live debut of their new single, “FourFiveSeconds” — which perfectly demonstrates the way the Grammys, with one masterstroke, can appeal to multiple generations and musical interests. In 2014, the Grammys tapped into the cultural zeitgeist by featuring performers ranging from Lorde to Daft Punk. The 2014 telecast secured 28 million viewers. By contrast, the MTV Video Music Awards, considered the younger, hipper alternative to the Grammys, has never attracted more than 12.4 million viewers.

Music industry critic Bob Lefsetz argues that the Grammy nominations perform an important role of getting music fans to pay attention. “Attention is everything in today’s world,” he writes. “Used to be there was a river of songs, now it’s a veritable tsunami, which is why so many people get out of the way, they’re afraid of being buried. But if someone makes sense of the incoming, if someone turns down the faucet to a trickle, then we’re not so overwhelmed.”

In effect, the Grammy nominations turn the faucet to a trickle by presenting us with a curated short list of performers to program into our music streams, ranging from Sam Smith to Hozier. Even the controversies generated by inevitable Grammy omissions make the Grammys useful by shining light on the also rans.

But the Grammys are culturally relevant in another important way, too: its use of social media. Advertisers capitalizing on the Grammy nomination announcements probably benefited from the way the Grammys tapped into social media to announce the nominees. Instead of doing a mass announcement, the Grammys revealed the nominees over a period of six hours February 5 via the Twitter accounts of different celebrities — creating a real-time stream rather than a real-time moment.

Taykey updates the Real-Time Trend Report on a quarterly basis (the next one should be published in April). The fourth-quarter 2014 edition contains far more insight into cultural trends across industries and demographics than I’ve discussed in this post. Read it and form your own conclusions. After reading the report, my single-biggest takeaway is this: for advertisers, the Grammys have already won.