Fun. and the Black Keys Enjoy Sales Boosts After 2012 MTV Movie Awards

Film fans like to carp about how the MTV Movie Awards are a meaningless display of affection for crowd-pleasing blockbusters like the ‘Twilight‘ flicks, but for the artists who perform at the ceremony, they can be pretty important — just ask fun. and the Black Keys, who both enjoyed sizable sales bumps the week after they played the show.

Fun. received the biggest bounce, picking up a 33 percent sales gain that translated to another 18,000 units sold for its ‘Some Nights’ album — and even though the band’s monster hit ‘We Are Young’ actually dropped by 25 percent, it really has nowhere to go but down after spending six weeks at No. 1, and anyway, that drop still meant an extra 103,000 copies of the single sold.

Meanwhile, the Black Keys picked up an 18 percent boost for its ‘El Camino’ album, as well as healthy increases for the two songs the band performed with Johnny Depp at the ceremony, ‘Gold on the Ceiling’ and ‘Lonely Boy.’ In fact, according to a rep for the Keys’ label, Warner Bros., they “also saw a healthy spike across some of the band’s prior albums and singles.”

According to Billboard, the awards show drew more than three million viewers — who spread the sales wealth to the evening’s other performers, including Wiz Khalifa, whose ‘Work Hard, Play Hard’ moved up 37 percent, and Martin Solveig, whose new single ‘The Night Out’ held on to most of the 112 percent increase it picked up the week before.