In 2023, Entertainment - Especially Music - Was a Major Part of Broadcast Sports Mic placement brought fans ever closer to the athletes By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Tuesday, January 9, 2024 - 11:07 am
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May you live in interesting times. That hoary and putatively Chinese blessing/curse was no more present than in broadcast-sports audio last year. 2023 was a year in which live entertainment on stadium stages rivaled that on the field, when fans were pulled closer to athletes than ever - thanks to increasingly intimate microphone placements - even given the prospect of games' not getting to air at all as RSNs struggled amid corporate clashes.
At the Intersection of Sports and Music 2023 will be remembered as year in which the connection between sports and entertainment reached new levels. The Super Bowl Halftime Show at State Farm Stadium in February was hailed as the third-most-watched television show in history, with an estimated 118 million people tuning in to see Rihanna - 5 million more viewers than the game itself attracted. But that annual event has become just the highest peak in a mountain range of entertainment increasingly partnered with major sports events.
The Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show featuring Rihanna attracted 5 million more viewers than the game itself.
Rihanna's star power was rivaled by the NBA All-Star Game, where Post Malone performed a medley of hits following the first-ever in-arena NBA All-Star Draft. It was part of a weekend's worth of entertainment and sports events in which Grammy winner Burna Boy, 2023 Grammy Award winner and Oscar-nominated singer/producer Tems, and rapper Rema collectively headlined an Afrobeats-themed NBA All-Star Game halftime show.
The third edition of the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix in downtown Nashville had a soundtrack that featured Florida-Georgia Line's Brian Kelley, Chris Janson, M tley Crue's Vince Neil, Gavin Degraw, and others.
League draft events have also turned into music moments. Less than a week after the Country Music Association's annual CMA Fest extravaganza took over Nashville's NFL Nissan Stadium, the 2023 NHL Draft moved into the Predators' Bridgestone Arena. Between them, it was as though the music never stopped, with the Brothers Osborne, Jo Dee Messina, Kip Moore, Maddie & Tae, Mitchell Tenpenny, and Dierks Bentley picking up where CMA left off. The almost seamless transition between one event and the next underscored sports' transformation into high-concept entertainment, complete with a red carpet.
When I started here about 13 years ago, the draft had already transitioned into an entertainment space, meaning into the arena environment, says Ivan Gottesfeld, EVP, broadcasting, NHL. Before that, drafts were held in ballrooms and spaces like that and were conducted strictly as business meetings. Since then, it has become an entertainment event for many touchpoints, such as league sponsorship, and the markets that we go to in an effort to grow the game.
Taylor Swifts appearances at Kansas City Chiefs games created $122 million in brand-value and added 550,000 followers to the team's social-media accounts.
But the big story for the marriage of music and sports was, of course, Traylor or Tayvis or Swelce, mashup monikers for the budding romance between newly minted billionaire Taylor Swift - her Eras tour boosted the entire U.S. economy by $5.7 billion - and KC Chiefs' Travis Kelce, who may be looking at his third Super Bowl ring this year. Her appearances at two NFL games to watch him play created an equivalent brand-value of $122 million, according to MarketWatch. Further, a study of Instagram, X, and TikTok data tracking the social-media followings of all 32 NFL teams from the beginning of the season found that the Chiefs gained nearly 550,000 new followers across its social-media accounts - a 6.48% increase and nearly double those of the next-highest Miami Dolphins.
More Close-Up Sound On-field and on-player sound also reached new levels last year. For instance, for the 2023 NHL All-Star activities, the audio team deployed wireless lavaliere microphones in the cones that athletes navigate in the skating competition to pick up the unique sound of blades in a tight turn; for the accuracy contest, a pair of shotgun mics in a golf-tee-box configuration captured the explosive impact of the shots.
The Skills competition on Friday affords us the opportunity to try some different things, a kind of Petri dish for different ideas we're trying out, says Dan Buddha Bernstein, lead A1, hockey, ESPN. It's its own kind of X Games or even a gymnastics event trying to mike individual elements that people might hit, like multiple mics in each goal for different kinds of shooting options. It's a test bed for new ideas.
Repartee between MLB outfielders and broadcast announcers has been increasing over the last couple of seasons. What began as a Spring Training experiment became a regular part of the broadcast audio when ESPN made it part of its Sunday Night Baseball sound palette. - and then took talking baseball to the next level.
Miked-up Dodger shortshop Miguel Rojas fielded a hit during on-field interview in Giants game.
ESPN wired two outfielders for sound for some games, with each player wearing a Q5X PlayerMic transmitter and a Countryman B6 microphone element, along with an IFB earpiece developed by the broadcaster and its RF partner, CP Communications. The miked outfielders were able to speak both with the booth announcers and with each other, a multipart conversation more complex than the previous season's single-player exchanges.
Interviews with headset-wearing team managers during the game are now a staple of the broadcast. There were also experiments with integration of soci
