The halftime show at the Super Bowl has been a music extravaganza in recent years, one with its own set of cycles. After Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction,” we went into a wave of classic rock acts, including McCartney, Springsteen and The Who, followed by a round of hip-pop with Madonna, Black Eyed Peas, Beyoncé, LMFAO, Nicki Minaj and Cee Lo Green. This year finds Bruno Mars the star of the halftime show, seemingly a continuation of the last two years’ trend with (only slightly) more testosterone.
But the Feb. 2, 2014 halftime show at MetLife Stadium, across the Hudson River from New York, in East Rutherford, NJ, is just the highlight of what’s turned into the biggest live-music penumbra around the Super Bowl yet. The week preceding the halftime show will have been filled with enough headliners and high-end sponsors to fill a Midwest stadium’s dance card for an entire summer. The Foo Fighters and the Roots were scheduled to set up along the west side of Manhattan, courtesy of Bud Light; Red Hot Chili Peppers performed at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, presented by CBS Radio; and John Legend and Band of Horses at an intimate space in Chelsea, courtesy of Citibank. Then there’s VH1’s Super Bowl Blitz, a six-stop mini-tour through New York City and New Jersey, starting at Queens College on Jan. 27 and broadcast live. And we’ve now reached a point in this relationship where the bucks are as big as the names: as per The New York Times, trade publication IEG Sponsorship Report estimates that music events more than doubled in a decade to $1.24 billion in sponsorships in 2013, from $575 million in 2003.
The connection between music and sports has been a strong one — and a long one. Over the last several decades, we’ve graduated from the Hammond Elegante at Yankee Stadium and the Yamaha A100 at Busch Stadium to ear-splitting P.A.’s churning out rock hits at NFL venues and hip-hop beats at NBA arenas. Television took it to another level, creating its own perennials by pairing country artists with theme songs, most notably — and notoriously — Hank Williams, Jr. with ABC/ESPN’s Monday Night Football, until Hank’s politics got in the way in 2011.
There’s also the connection between music and the athletes themselves, from Mike Reid, the former Cincinnati Bengals’ player who later penned a dozen number-one country hits including Ronnie Milsap’s “Stranger in My House” to New York Yankees’ centerfielder Bernie Williams, a jazz guitarist that Paul McCartney signed to his publishing company in 2009. And the sports-music connection reaches beyond the studio — former North Carolina Division I basketball player Christen Greene now manages the Lumineers, among other acts.
Live Sports, Live Music
But the connection between sports and live music has become the most robust of these pairings. Aside from the annual Super Bowl extravaganzas, teams have been increasingly integrating live music into games; when the Tennessee Titans renovated their Nashville stadium three years ago, they included a stage built into one wall for country artists to perform on during breaks in the game. Of course, sports venues have hosted major concerts for decades, since The Beatles conquered Shea Stadium in 1964. But music performances at stadiums and arenas tended to be events inserted into alien, if not downright hostile environments, most of the time since those early days, because sound in sports stadiums tended to suck even for sports — the famous echoes in Lou Gehrig’s “luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech in the 1943 film The Pride of the Yankees, parodied by scores of comedians including The Simpsons, were only a hint of the truly mangled audio that until recently, was the historical norm in most big sports facilities.
In fact, it was the increased use of those venues by music shows during the arena-rock days of the 1980’s that in part sparked a revolution in stadium and arena acoustic and system designs that began in the early 1990’s and continues today. Major-league sports continued with a near-complete renovation of its venue infrastructure in the last 20 years. Meanwhile, the spiraling cost of new stadiums and seemingly constant upgrades — mainly to sound systems — later compelled the cities and counties, the entities most on the hook for these multi-billion-dollar deals, to look for ways to use these facilities in other profitable ways. Assuming you don’t make post-season play, an NFL team is literally only going to use its stadium eight times during the regular season. Along with conventions, university graduations (NYU rents Yankee Stadium every June) and corporate rentals, music has been the big go-to for their sales staffs. And in order to attract high-end touring shows, the sound systems in these coliseums had to keep getting better.
And they have. In the last decade, line arrays have become common as installed systems in sports venues, and they are increasingly designed to augment touring systems, with in-place nosebleed and balcony fills. The shift to digital FOH consoles is nearly complete on the major-league level, with collegiate facilities not far behind and even high-school football programs eyeing Mackie and Behringer digital desks. Digital audio networks are the latest addition to stadium sound system designs.
This relationship has been good for the companies that support both touring artists and sports shows. This year’s Super Bowl will be the 19th straight for ATK Audiotek, which boasts a better winning record than even the Broncos or the Pats. (See “Production Profile,” page 26, this issue). Other SR providers, rigging companies, videowall builders and grips, gaffers and go-fers will be benefiting from the expansive music line-up around that game across the river from New York. And if you think this is big, wait until you see what’s playing around the World Cup in Rio later in the year. Four years ago, a slate including Shakira, Alicia Keys, Black Eyed Peas and John Legend drew millions to the new venues in South Africa. While no names had been announced for this year’s World Cup festivities as this issue went to press, both Paul McCartney and Beyoncé have tour schedules that have them in Brazil this coming May. And those same venues, many newly built or recently refurbished, will also be ready for sports and music duty during the Summer Olympics there in 2016.
The relationship between live music and sports looks like it’s still only in the early innings of what’s continuing to be a great game — both now and in the future.
