Yo, Pass The Rock
Georgina Gustin

It might've started inadvertently with Queen's "We Are the Champions," but somewhere, along the music-sports continuum, professional sports leagues began strategically using music to win fans -- and the music industry jumped happily aboard.

Music sells sports and sports sells music.

"It's a great, symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship," says Mike Bass, head of communications for the NBA, which produced an ad with the Black Eyed Peas to promote this year's finals.

It's not just an accompaniment, a facet of the "game-day experience" or a way to get fans fired up anymore. It's a formal marketing tool -- one that works successfully in some sports and disastrously in others. Critics say, as the sports-music marketing apparatus has gotten so pervasive and sophisticated, it inevitably has started to focus on new and younger wallets, alienating older, more staid fans who are just tuning out.

"We basically leverage the power of sport," said Pat O'Connor, founder of POC Media, which gets between $25,000 and $50,000 from record labels, including all the majors, to land sports-arena exposure for its artists. "We're trying to get the sports organizations to play cutting edge music rather than tailoring it to the 40-year-old demographic. The same kid that's wearing Nikes because LeBron James is wearing Nikes wants to hear Chingy rather than something that was hot in the 80s."

Even the hushed PGA Tour is trying to liven up the golfing scene, earlier this year hiring William Morris, one of the world's largest talent and literary agencies, to "expand brand presence" in the entertainment community. The arrangement may not lead to bands playing along the fairways at tournaments, but PGA execs say that's not out of the question. Certainly, we can expect to see more golfers in film, television and videos.

When ESPN launched its first X Games a decade ago, it employed a hugely succesful MTV-esque formula, and other sports leagues took notice. With the X Games, athletes chose the songs they wanted playing as they competed, giving the whole thing a video-like feel -- and creating a new, lucrative sports franchise in the process. "I don't think the X Games could be what it is without music," said Melissa Gullotti, of ESPN. "It's what drives the athletes."

Taking a page from the X Games stylebook, professional baseball players started requesting that certain songs get blasted when they walk up to the plate. Alex Rodriguez, then of the Seattle Mariners, took a shine to a song five years ago, and within months "Who Let the Dogs Out," which started as A-Rod's own personal serenade, was a contagion, a hit that might never have made radio if the promotion department at the team hadn't plucked it out of the new music file.

But the musical relationship that's native to the X Games, and other sports like snow and skate boarding, isn't as pervasive in the live culture of other sports -- and the relationship between the industries isn't as comfortable.

About 10 years ago the NFL decided it would make music even more of a centerpiece in its Super Bowl extravaganza, designing halftime shows to appeal to every demographic. "We always look to feature a diverse show," said Brian McCarthy, an NFL spokesman, noting, that with 140 million viewers this year, the Super Bowl drew the largest audience of any television broadcast ever. In other words, he said, the music needed to reach a range of people -- hence the appearances of Jessica Simpson, P Diddy and Kid Rock this year.

But the notoriously control freakish NFL lost control of one particular variable -- Janet Jackson's breast -- and recoiled immediately from its music-friendly tack by announcing the removal of NSync's JC Chasez from its Pro Bowl concert and the cancellation of its kick-off concert in Times Square later this year. "We're going to be taking greater hands-on control," said McCarthy, about next year's show, explaining that all the songs and costumes will be vetted by the NFL, rather than a production company, like this year's MTV.

So, as the NFL has tried to be all musical things to all people, the NBA has become virtually indistinguishable from one genre -- hip hop.

"You can parallel the rise of the NBA with the rise of hip hop," said Todd Boyd, author of Young, Black, Rich, and Famous, a book about the NBA and the ascent of hip hop. Now, Boyd notes, hip hop is the most popular music form in the country, "so it would make sense the NBA would identify with it."

The current generation of basketball players grew up with hip hop and brought it to the courts where the setting is more intimate than other sports and where individual stars rise faster, younger and, perhaps, with greater public scrutiny. Boyd, for one, thinks that hip hop has disenfranchised older, white fans because of an old, white media that can't identify with hip hop culture. "Race is part of it, sure. But age is a big part of it as well," he said, adding, "If they're disenfranchised they assume everyone else is."

In fact, audience attendance at NBA games has risen over the past ten years, even as the more lucrative television audience has plummeted, and the people who can afford to pay for live tickets are very often older, wealthier white guys. The NBA's Mike Bass notes, too, that the ratings drop is not exclusive to NBA basketball. "Every sport has lost its audience in the last decade," he said.

Sports events now are tightly choreographed. In-house production people choosing the songs, and videos, with footage of taped action, play on score boards, often with music credits attached. Record companies court the teams to get their artists' songs played at games while the teams work to fine-tune just the right line up of songs. "There's a tightrope they walk between it being fun, cool and interesting," said Peter Land, a former marketing director for the NBA, now running the sports division at PR giant Edelman, "and losing their core audience."

Some sports fans, though, want their sporting pure, and it's unclear how much entertainment crossover traditionalists will tolerate. Even less conservative audiences and fans have reached their threshold for the entertainment-sports mix.

"The whole thing is so commercialized it's beyond belief," said Daily Show regular, football fan and comedian Lewis Black, riffing on the NFL's biggest day. "The way things are evolving with the Super Bowl, in 10 years they'll just have planes fly over and dump shit on people. But it'll be done to music."

Georgina Gustin is a free-lance writer living in St. Louis. This is her first work for Arriviste Press.