Inside TNT Sports’ Lucrative, Star-Studded Branded Concerts for the NBA, NCAA & More
Written by djfrosty on February 13, 2025
In April 2022, when The Kid LAROI headlined the March Madness Festival in New Orleans, the Australian rapper was at a “critical time in his career,” as one of his agents, Sara Schoch, recalls. He was on the brink of switching to a new manager and he was about to release a follow-up track to his smash single “Stay” with Justin Bieber. “He was rolling out new music and reframing how he was presenting to fans,” says Schoch, United Talent Agency’s co-head of global brand music partnerships.
The venue LAROI’s team chose was TNT Sports, for which he headlined a Coca-Cola-sponsored stage at the televised March Madness Music Festival in New Orleans and made a commercial for the soda brand containing original music. Within a month, his single “Thousand Miles” debuted at No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100. The connection led to a broader brand deal, including an alternative-reality-enhanced video that was part of Coke’s summer-music campaign. Then he sold out a tour of ballrooms and amphitheaters in minutes. “It was a big deal,” Schoch says. “The TNT team is artist-first and understanding of who’s going to break. They give [artists] media visibility. They have the infrastructure. I haven’t seen an organization bring all those things together, especially in such a consistent way.”
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Where rival sports networks mostly focus on fixed, one-time, widely viewed events — like the Super Bowl Halftime Show or Beyoncé‘s halftime performance during the NFL’s Christmas Day game last year, both on Fox Sports — TNT’s operations-plus-A&R-plus-brands skillset is unique. Known for its NBA and NCAA basketball coverage — and to a lesser extent hockey, auto-racing and tennis events — the network has spent the last decade and a half building makeshift stages in U.S. cities for free events, signing headlining superstars from Kendrick Lamar to Rihanna to Bruce Springsteen, helping to break new artists such as Doechii and Shaboozey and broadcasting all the copiously brand-stamped events on cable television. For this weekend’s NBA All-Star Game in the Bay Area, Chance the Rapper will headline an opening concert, broadcast on TNT, on Thursday evening (Feb. 13) at Pier 48 in San Francisco.
“We’re jack of all trades, I guess,” says André Plasiance, TNT Sports’ vp of live events, who acts as a sort of A&R man combined with a concert promoter. “We got a lot of things on our plate.”
One of Plaisance’s first events for the network, then known as Turner Sports, was to build a stage near the Mississippi River in New Orleans for a Jimmy Buffett concert as part of the three-day NCAA Big Dance Concert Series in 2012. Even Buffett’s people were confused about how Turner would basically create an entire city, including the stage, out of a park. One of them asked Plaisance, a New Orleans native, “Ever been there?” Plaisance replied: “Not really.” But the team pulled off the event, which also featured KISS and The Black Keys, before some 130,000 people.
Since then, Plaisance says, “There’s a level of trust that we could do that successfully. We’re able to build on that throughout the years.”
Basketball, according to Rick Faigin, executive vp of Acceleration Community of Companies, an agency that works with artists and brands, has a way of intersecting with music that other sports don’t have, even when they try — like Major League Baseball, which sporadically stages performers during its Home Run Derby, or the annual Super Bowl Soulful Celebration, starring The Isley Brothers, Yolanda Adams and others in recent years. Some of that may be “because TNT has made it that way,” Faigin says. He adds that the Super Bowl Halftime Show has exactly one sponsor — Apple Music — while TNT Sports’ various events surrounding NBA games and March Madness provide far more music-branding opportunities. (It must be noted that Chance the Rapper and The Smashing Pumpkins performed during player introductions and intermissions in a New Year’s Eve 2024 NHL game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, broadcast on TNT.)
“One thing [TNT’s team] are great at is delivering a high-quality production that rivals any of the major music festivals out there, from the staging to the overall production to the festival grounds,” says Byron Taub, vp of sponsorships and experiential marketing for Capital One, which has partnered with the network since 2011. “We want to create memories for our customers through these memorable types of events. We’re looking to create immersive experiences that tap into their passions — sports, music, dining, entertainment.”
For TNT, “the home run, or slam dunk, or three-point shot, whatever analogy you want to use,” according to Plaisance, is when the network can work with an artist to break a pump-it-up sports anthem. Examples include Muse‘s “Madness,” which became a March Madness anthem in 2013, licensed for TV promos and performed in a concert in Atlanta; and The Black Keys’ 2024 track “Beautiful People (Stay High),” used in Final Four promos last year around the time the band performed at TNT Sports’ Capital One Jamfest. “We’re constantly looking for those synchs to have that 360 tie-in, for the broadcast and the band live experience as well,” Plaisance says.
“It’s exposure you can’t pay for,” adds Dave Aussenberg, music brand partnerships agent at Creative Artists Agency, which represents Shaboozey, Mumford & Sons and others who’ve played TNT sports-and-music events. “These are some of the most desirable sporting events to attend. The more music events you attach to these weekends, it’s a huge win for fans.”
In a half-hour Zoom, Plaisance suggests his passion lies in building venues from scratch, beginning with the Buffett performance in 2012. For the NCAA’s annual March Madness basketball tournament games in San Antonio, “You’re basically building an arena in a downtown park, providing everything from the festival perimeter to the restrooms to the stage, every piece of infrastructure, generators,” Plaisance says. “You get to build a new arena every year.”
For Plaisance, a native of Southwest Louisiana, a lifelong obsession with live music began when his parents took him to Willie Nelson‘s concert at the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans. When the Superdome reopened in 2006, symbolizing the city’s post-Hurricane Katrina rebirth, U2 and Green Day’s performances showed Plaisance “what music can do to a building.”
“I get goosebumps, right now, thinking about that,” he continues. “You see how relevant music is with sports and the crowd. That made an impression on me.”