“Ladies and gentlemen…”

Those three words have launched an infinite number of speeches, announcements, and other presentations, but on Saturday Night Live, they've launched musical performances from all the most legendary musicians in history.

Saturday Night Live (SNL), is celebrating its 50th season this year. In that half-century, all the following artists have been musical guests: David Bowie, Taylor Swift, A Tribe Called Quest, Rage Against The Machine, Radiohead, Bille Eilish, Outkast, Sade, Britney Spears, and Paul McCartney.

Performing on late-night TV shows is the norm for artists of this caliber, but after five decades and nearly 1,000 episodes, SNL is the most prestigious of them all.

“We always, without even questioning it, consider SNL to be the gold standard of late-night TV,” says Jaime Finkel, an artist manager at Maverick Management. She is on the team that oversees numerous artists who have performed on SNL including Paul McCartney and Arcade Fire.

SNL has reached this standard because compared to other late-night programs, it's the most performance-forward. Other shows like Fallon, Kimmel, and Colbert are more about them and their personalities night after night. They'll bring on celebrities to interview and there is a musical guest at the end, but the consistent factor is the host.

On SNL, there is a new host every week performing new comedy sketches alongside the cast. The musical guest gets to play two songs, one of which is right in the middle rather than at the end when many people would likely already be asleep. Sometimes the host is also the musical guest as Billie Eilish was for her December 2023 appearance, performing sketches and songs throughout the entire 90 minutes of airtime.

SNL is about pure entertainment, and that spirit within the show has drawn inspiring performances since 1975. As a part of SNL celebrating 50 years, Questlove produced Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of SNL Music. The documentary includes footage from dozens of performances. Mick Jagger, Miley Cyrus, Jack White, and Tom Morello, are a sample of the artists who recount their unique experiences playing their two-song sets.

Well, Morello’s set was actually only one song. When he performed with his revolutionary rock band, Rage Against The Machine (RATM) in 1996, they saw it as an opportunity to stage a protest and were never invited back. But Morello maintains SNL was the forum to take such a risk:

“Being on SNL was something that was valued. It was a part of the DNA of American culture and entertainment,” Morello says in the documentary.

Some stories of SNL’s performances are far more embarrassing, such as the infamous Ashlee Simpson ho-down wherein the burgeoning pop starlet was caught lip-syncing, crippling her music career.

All in all, whether it’s a protest band staging a demonstration or a public humiliation for a young singer poised to be the next big thing, these moments bear weight because of SNL’s reputation.

“When you think back to the early 00s — which is when I was watching as a fan and not booking artists on it — SNL was the most prestigious late-night option even then, but it was also the way that you could promote an upcoming album. You could actually make a significant impact in terms of driving sales, dictating radio play, and promoting an upcoming tour,” Finkel says.

That reputation is still backed up by numbers. According to the US TV Database, since March of 2022, SNL has fluctuated from 1.2 million to 6.6 million viewers per episode with the 2020 premiere bringing in over 8 million. But now in the 2010s and 2020s, when Finkel has been a part of the music industry, these late-night shows play a different role:

“Late night is less of a promotional tool for driving sales and streams, and more of a marketing piece of the puzzle. It is still incredibly important. But it's more about maintaining momentum and driving buzz. It's part of the grander plan. In addition to [late night] you still need a media blitz that includes digital advertising, influencer marketing, things like that,” Finkel says. “It's about the prestige. It can give you a boost in sales if something goes viral. But that's not something that you can bank on at all.”

Virality is a tricky thing when an artist is at the top of their field like those who perform on SNL. For example, Billie Eilish has performed on SNL four times since 2019. All eight of the songs she performed on those dates are on YouTube, ranging from 2.5 to 8.6 million views at the time of writing. The most-watched video is of “Bad Guy” from her first appearance on September 29, 2019. By Eilish’s standards, 8.6 million views after more than five years is not viral. Her music video for “lovely” with Khalid has over 2.1 billion views in six years.

Ariana Grande’s performance of “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” on SNL has over 14.3 million views after less than a year, but numerous videos on her YouTube page also have billions of views. 

Looking at more fluctuating data metrics like Spotify monthly listeners, none of Eilish’s or Grande’s SNL appearances were the sole cause of a major spike in listeners. Eilish lost listeners three out of four weeks of her appearances. The one where she gained listeners was the most recent on October 19, 2024. This particular appearance came right after she started the tour for her new album, Hit Me Hard And Soft. She played three gigs at Madison Square Garden and stopped by SNL while she was in New York.

Similarly, Grande’s SNL slot on March 9, 2024, was part of a gain of 13.7 million listeners over the course of five weeks, but her performance was the day after her album, Eternal Sunshine, was released. 

By contrast, the three appearances where Eilish lost listeners were either at the tail end of an album campaign or were not attached to one of her campaigns at all. Her December 2023 appearance came in the wake of Barbie to which she contributed the single, “What Was I Made For?”.

“SNL does a beautiful job of curating their musical acts in that way. They have something for everyone. They've got legacy artists that appeal to a more traditional audience or their longer-standing fans. They also have artists who are fully in the moment, having this crazy blowout campaign. That can help bring in younger audiences. Then they have incredible talents’ celebratory laps or their little dances they do after a football touchdown,” Finkel says. 

Eilish lost Spotify monthly listeners after her SNL performances that came towards the end of her album cycles for WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO? (2019) and Happier Than Ever (2021), but SNL was her victory lap. Especially for the former because she won all the Big Four Grammys the following February. But no matter if SNL is an artist’s victory lap or they're having a blowout campaign, they have to be at a certain echelon before coming on the show. 

“It's hard to book on SNL. Unless you have those existing relationships and make a promotional appearance, you have to have that fire before you even get the opportunity,” Finkel says. This claim is backed up by the genre breakdown of artists who performed from seasons 40 to 50. 57 of them were pop and 40 were hip-hop/rap (which was the #1 genre on Chartmetric's 2024 year-end report). SNL is looking for major, palatable artists to book on the show.

Consider Chappell Roan, the undisputed queen of pop in 2024. She performed on SNL in November 2024 at the tail end of the campaign for her album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which came out in September 2023. That record includes major hits like “Hot To Go,” “Pink Pony Club,” and “Red Wine Supernova,” but she didn’t get the SNL booking until over a year after those songs came out. 

The booking isn’t based on the quality of the songs. She needed to be a star first. Her performance ended up being a victory lap and a place to debut her new country song, “The Giver.” Now that she is a star though, for her next inevitable turn on the program, she could launch an album like Grande or promote a tour like Eilish.

Interestingly enough, even Chappell Roan and all her immense hype lost Spotify monthly listeners the week of her SNL performance. The fact that it was her debut didn’t matter. However, one area where her slot led to growth was her Instagram followers. In the three weeks leading up to and immediately following her performance, she gained 292.8k followers. By comparison, in the previous three weeks, she only gained 181k and in the following three weeks, she gained 150.8k.

Such numbers don’t point to SNL as a make or break for stardom, but a visual-forward following appreciates SNL performances because artists will now curate bespoke production just for that one event.

When Roan sang “Pink Pony Club,” she created an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque Queen-of-Hearts throne room. Eilish performed “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” on a stage surrounded on all sides, floor-to-ceiling by LED walls showing footage of a clear blue sky. Grande was inside a quaintly decorated living room for “we can’t be friends (wait for your love).”

“I've had conversations with label teams where we’ll have a budget, and in that budget, there's an asterisk: If there's an opportunity to be on SNL we'll build another budget for that on top of the budget of this campaign. That's not something that you get necessarily with other TV ops,” Finkel says.

This budget investment paid off for Eilish and Grande in a similar manner to Roan. For all their SNL appearances where they were the musical guest within Chartmetric’s applicable date range, there was a noticeable bump in their Instagram followers. 

Videos from these bespoke performances make great content for Instagram, but overall, building something unique for SNL is more cultural at this point.

“When artists have the opportunity to do something visually stunning and show off another side of them, they jump at that opportunity,” Finkel says, going on to specifically mention her experience working with Arcade Fire on SNL. During their last performance in 2022, they launched inflatable air dancers during their first song, “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid).” 

“We're talking about some of the most creative people on Earth. They have such a vision.  When an artist knows this is their moment to flex a little bit, a creative band like Arcade Fire is coming to the table with almost fully developed ideas of what they would like to achieve,” Finkel continues. 

Other late-night shows certainly have value for artists. Her video of “THE GREATEST” on Colbert has over 7.3 million views, but other than her inherent talent, it doesn't demonstrate the kind of vision for a performance Eilish presented on SNL. 

SNL is where these artists come to perform. They’ve been on that stage, live from New York, for the last 50 years. Many of them will be there “once again” sometime in the next 50 along with all the biggest stars of tomorrow.