The first-ever YouTube Music Awards are live this Sunday evening at 6pmET and to celebrate, we did a little digging into the data behind some of the 2013 nominees, all of which were selected based on a series of viewership, subscriber, and/or engagement metrics. (To get all the details on the nominees read this or check out the YouTube Spotlight channel where you can also vote for the winners.)

Video of the year is one of the categories drawing the most interest, and that's not really a surprise when you consider the 1.9 billion views these videos currently have combined. That's an average of over half a million views for every second of video.

Here is daily viewership data (though, please note that we have cut off the initial "Gentleman" spike, which at a record 38 million views in a single day made this chart hilariously unreadable):



The ten nominees for Artist of the Year drew nearly 10 billion views combined on their official videos between October 2012 and the start of this month. They also saw large numbers of new subscribers to those channels. And while many of the artists reside in the United States, when you look at likes, shares, and other types of fan activity, over 75% of the combined engagement top artists saw was from outside the U.S.

Here you can see their weekly growth in subscribers and the impact new video releases from Rihanna and PSY had on their channels:



While the data determined the nominees, the winners will be decided by fans whose sharing activity this week and last will be tallied right up to Sunday night's show.

For the expert trend trackers, see if you can guess what keyword this graph of YouTube search data represents... (hint: it's the top spiking "music"-related search of 2013)



Click to find the answer.

-- Kevin Allocca