GRAMMY #1

THE award or the performance? The recognition or the spectacle? Those are perennial questions for the Grammy Awards, which will be bestowed for the 52nd time on Sunday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and broadcast live on CBS at 8 p.m. Eastern Time.

At a time when the music industry is suffering punishing sales losses, and technology has helped music become ubiquitous, is it more important to win the official approval of the Recording Academy’s 12,000 voting members, or simply to get the face time on television?

“I couldn’t tell you who won song of the year four years ago,” said Stephen Hill, president for entertainment programming and music specials for BET, “but I remember that Jamie Foxx and Kanye West put on an incredible performance of ‘Gold Digger.’ ”

For the Grammys these are not theoretical concerns. Its ratings have been slipping since the mid-1980s, and low viewership recently has affected the bottom line. Last year the cost of a 30-second commercial during the show dropped below $500,000 for the first time in a decade, according to Nielsen.

Last year the Recording Academy added more live performances than ever, including U2 playing a brand-new song, “Get On Your Boots,” and a nine-months-pregnant M.I.A. rapping alongside Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, T.I. and Mr. West. Those helped goose the ratings to 19.05 million, about 11 percent higher than in 2008.

The stage will be just as busy this year. Mary J. Blige and Andrea Bocelli will sing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (an iTunes download will benefit Haiti relief efforts); Green Day will be joined by the cast of its musical-theater show, “American Idiot”; Jeff Beck will honor Les Paul; and Elton John, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Black Eyed Peas and Mr. Foxx will all be in there somewhere. And since two dimensions are simply not enough for the King of Pop, there will also be a 3-D tribute to Michael Jackson.

“While the awards are significant,” Neil Portnow, president of the Recording Academy, said in a telephone interview this week, “ultimately, it’s the amazing performances that are the trademark.”

For most artists, though, there is still a great value in peer recognition. That value can be directly measured in album sales in the weeks following the awards, and less directly in the long-term prestige (and increased booking rates) that can result when the words “Grammy-winning artist” become permanently appended to an act’s name, said Scott Borchetta, the president of Big Machine Records. That label’s top talent, Taylor Swift, is up for eight awards, including in the top three categories: album, song and record of the year. (Song of the year is for songwriters; record is for a song’s performer, and she qualifies for both for “You Belong With Me.”)

“Our culture still looks to be attached to winners,” Mr. Borchetta said. “The Grammys are still a very prestigious thing to have in your gun belt.”

In many ways Ms. Swift, 20, is already a big winner. Her album “Fearless” has sold 5.4 million copies, a magnitude of blockbuster that most of the music industry had thought was permanently lost. But her competition is strong. For album of the year she is up against Beyoncé’s “I Am ... Sasha Fierce” (Columbia), Lady Gaga’s “Fame” (Interscope), Black Eyed Peas’ “The E.N.D.” (Interscope) and the Dave Matthews Band’s “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King” (RCA), all strong commercial and critical contenders. Ms. Swift also faces Beyoncé and Lady Gaga in record and song of the year, leading to the possibility of the top awards being divided among three young women who have mastered the art of self-determined pop stardom.

Longtime Grammy watchers, however, know that the most popular album does not necessarily win. Last year Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s country-tinged “Raising Sand” (Rounder) beat hits by Lil Wayne and Coldplay, and two years ago Herbie Hancock beat Amy Winehouse and Mr. West. The dark horse this time around could be Mr. Matthews, who has won two Grammys but none from the top categories.

“They work hard to get the voting process in line with the way music is today,” Mr. Hill said of the Recording Academy. “But for some reason it seems like the more mature artists, the ones who have been around for a while, seem to win, for a body of work as opposed to what they did this particular year.”

In one quirk of this year’s awards, the window of eligibility only was only 11 months, from Oct. 1, 2008, to Aug. 31, 2009, which disqualified albums by Jay-Z, Barbra Streisand, Miranda Lambert and Mariah Carey. The reason, Mr. Portnow said, was that the Recording Academy needed to broadcast the show earlier than usual to avoid competition with the 2010 Winter Olympics, which begin Feb. 12.

Next to album, record and song of the year, the most prominent award is for best new artist, and as in past years the Recording Academy has raised plenty of eyebrows by nominating a number of artists who aren’t exactly brand new. The Zac Brown Band has released three studio albums, the earliest from 2004, and the Silversun Pickups, prominent in indie-rock since about 2006, have released two. Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser of MGMT, when asked about their nomination for best new artist, expressed a common hey-we’ll-take-it ambivalence.