Somebody that you should know: Grammy winners propelled further Post-Grammys success ... Fun. album in iTunes top 5. Little-known artists Gotye and Fun. are expected to reach new heights in the United States after their Grammy wins yesterday. Some 28.1 million Americans watched the Grammy awards show on television - a predictable 30 per cent drop from last year's emotion-filled ceremony following the death of singer Whitney Houston, according to ratings data. Despite the lower numbers, the 3.5-hour show broadcast live on CBS was the second-largest TV audience for the music industry's big night since 1993, and many critics gave the show a thumbs up. "For the first time in too long, the Grammys telecast was a good time in and of itself - a refreshingly coherent celebration of our increasingly incoherent popscape," wrote Chris Richards of the Washington Post. In the absence of new music from big names such as Lady Gaga or Beyonce, Sunday's Grammy show highlighted rising stars and younger artists and spread the top prizes over a wide variety of acts. British folk band Mumford & Sons won Album of the Year for Babel, indie-pop trio Fun. won Song of the Year for We Are Young and Australian singer Gotye won Record of the Year for Somebody That I Used to Know. Many of the winners and performers found themselves high on the iTunes sales chart on Monday, with Justin Timberlake leading the charge with pre-orders for his upcoming album The 20/20 Experience, his first since 2006. Fun.'s album Some Nights and Babel were also among the Top 5 on the iTunes albums chart on Monday. When the upcoming New York indie band released We Are Young as the lead single for their second studio album Some Nights in September 2011, it went largely unnoticed, only garnering some attention from online critics and quickly fading off the Billboard Hot 100 after debuting at No. 53, according to Deadline.com. Fun., like Gotye, may have stayed relatively unnoticed had it not been for Fox's popular musical show Glee . Both artists were covered in pivotal scenes, with Gotye's Some-body That I Used to Know performed by Glee's Matt Bomer and Darren Criss on April 10, last year. "Gotye is one of those artists that's been around for a while," Criss told InsideTV.ew.com at the time. I've been a Gotye fan for awhile. When you see the songs on the second page of the script - you open up and you'll see five or six songs and it doesn't say who's singing what - so when you see a song like that, you're like 'Oh my God! Please! Please!'. The performance kicked off a string of high-profile performances of Somebody That I Used to Know, including by Phillip Phillips on American Idol the next night and by Gotye and Kimbra on Saturday Night Live three days later. It propelled the song to No. 1, turning it into a mega hit overnight, having only premiered at No. 91 in the U.S. in January, 2012, according to Deadline.com. The success has gone both ways, with the Glee versions of Fun. and Gotye's songs also enjoying blockbuster sales. Glee music supervisor PJ Bloom admitted he was reluctant at first. "Glee doesn't break bands," he told Billboard last year. We celebrate existing pop success - that's our core model. But things have begun to change for both Glee and the Grammys. Richards, of the Washington Post, wrote about yesterday's Grammys: "There were A-game performances, trophy-hoarders who deserved to win them and very few reasons to wince, grouse or wish you were watching 'Downton Abbey'." Mikael Wood of The Los Angeles Times said smaller, intimate moments, like Rihanna's stripped down balled Stay, stood out among the bigger production numbers on Sunday night's show. "In a 3.5-hour blur of high-tech spectacle, these performances felt like reaffirmations of core musical values - honest, unaffected, simple," wrote Wood. Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone Magazine noted that in the past few years "the Grammys bash has turned into the awards show that really aims to capture the crackle and sparkle of pop music, in all its demented excess. And last night was full of demented moments. It had R&B crooners and big-cheddar teen smoothies. Sheffield said Taylor Swift's Alice in Wonderland-themed opener "set the tone for a whole night of over-the-top performances." Sunday's telecast also featured Sting, Rihanna and Bruno Mars joined Ziggy and Damian Marley in a tribute to late reggae singer Bob Marley. Elton John teamed up with Mumford & Sons, Mavis Staples, Zac Brown Band and Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes for a tribute to late US rock musician Levon Helm. The 2012 Grammy telecast attracted 39.9 million viewers and was the second-largest Grammy TV audience ever, thanks largely to British singer Adele's six wins and performance comeback after throat surgery and the drowning death of Houston in a bathtub in a Beverly Hills hotel the night before show. Reuters, with Aja Styles.