There were several records broken during Sunday's Super Bowl between the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks, and most of them had something to do with the former's futility. There was a more optimistic record broken, as Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers gathered the largest halftime show audience in the game's history.
More than 115.3 million people tuned in to see Mars and his RHCP collaborators, according to Nielsen. That narrowly edged Madonna's 2012 show (114 million viewers), and beat Beyoncé's show last year (110.8 million) as well.
There was general agreement among viewers and critics that Mars had executed the show with excellence, from his opening drums solos, to his James Brown footwork, to his closing ballad performance of "Just The Way Your Are." The sentiment shouldn't be surprising, but many questioned whether Mars had the "star power" to hold down the world's biggest music stage. Josh Klinghoffer, the "new guy" in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, else deserved credit for keeping his band afloat with an impassioned solo to close out "Give It Away."
Considering how lopsided the game was up to that point, many were surprised to find out Mars got the audience he did. Two theories to explain those 115.3 million viewers:
1) Fans desperately needed something to entertain them. Unless you were a Denver or Seattle fan, you had little reason to stay tuned in. Denver needed to perform an unheard of comeback against the best defense in football to win, and you could watch all the unaired commercials on the internet. People just wanted to get some entertainment from this Super Bowl, and they put their hopes in Mars.
2) Or, more likely, viewership was just high throughout. The halftime show wasn't the only thing to break records. The game itself managed to break the record for most viewers, averaging 111.5 million throughout. We don't have an official graph, but we can estimate based on the numbers that the game started with ah higher total, and began trickling downward as the Broncos continued to flub. Either way, when you have a record-sized audience overall, you're likely to have a big halftime audience as well.
Regardless of how he got the audience, Mars has got to be happy. Both with the positive reviews, and with the boost in sales it'll bring his 2012 LP Unorthodox Jukebox, which Billboard has hinted will jump back into the Top 10 this week. Tune in tomorrow for updates on that front.
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