Major League Music
In his two seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies, catcher Garrett Stubbs has played in just 87 of a possible 324 games — par for the course when you’re backing up J.T. Realmuto, commonly referred to by Phillies fans as the “BCIB” (Best Catcher in Baseball). But despite his limited time on the field, Stubbs has become one of the most beloved and recognizable Phils for his role as the team’s preeminent Clubhouse Guy — as well as their anointed post-game DJ.
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With the Phils’ locker room turning into Philadelphia’s hottest club over their five playoff series victories across 2022-23, Stubbs has also become one of the city’s most influential aux-cord wielders with his celebratory selections, collected in his publicly available “Phils Win” Spotify playlist (nearly 30,000 likes). The most famous of the bunch, Tiësto’s remix of Calum Scott’s cover of Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” caught so much local heat after it became the Phils’ unlikely postseason anthem in 2022, which propelled the song back onto the Billboard charts, making the Digital Song Sales top 10 last October.
Below, Stubbs talks with Billboard about how he became The Guy for soundtracking the team’s champagne-soaked celebrations, as well as why his club loves a good dance remix, and whether they’ll ever be able to get away from “Dancing on My Own.”
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How did you become the sort of official team DJ/Spotify playlist curator here?
Somebody’s gotta do it, and I’d say because my role on the team as far as playing time goes is limited, I just became the guy who came into the locker room after the games to turn on the music. As guys started to like certain songs, I just started to accumulate the ones that everyone liked and put them into a playlist. And then slowly but surely, there ended up being 1, 2, 20, 50, 100 songs on the playlist.
Over the past couple years, who else on the team have been your supporting curators?
Schwarbs [Kyle Schwarber] is a big one. He’s certainly a guy that brings good vibes to the locker room. [Nick] Castellanos is another one. He’s got very eclectic taste in music — he’s a huge J. Cole fan and likes to play anything from rap all the way to ODESZA. And he is a big fan of those two — if you walk into the locker room and either one of those two is playing, he definitely got ahold of the sticks.
Do you need a sort of quorum of team approval to put a song on the playlist? Are there any times that you try to sneak one on that you like — or do you need to have, like, a couple co-signs before you put one on the official team playlist?
No, I put random songs on there all the time. [Laughs.] So I generally will just like a song and put it on there, and then it’ll play in the locker room at certain times of the day, or after the game, and when the song comes on, I’ll just around the locker room and see what vibe I’m getting from everybody. And if it’s good, it stays, and if it’s not good, it gets taken off quickly.
Do you remember any times you got a particularly bad response to a song you were excited about?
Not so much a bad response — I mean, sometimes guys get over songs. Like we have Waka Flocka [Flame] on there — Schwarbs is a big Waka Flocka fan, so he will put Waka Flocka on there. And at times, if we get too much Waka, it gets worn out quickly. But there are other songs on there that come and go as post-game music. But the top four songs are always [Shouse’s] “Love Tonight,” [Calum Scott’s cover of] “Dancing on My Own,” [Trey Lewis’] “D–ked Down in Dallas” and then [Alabama’s] “Dixieland Delight.”
But we make trades during the year, right? And we try to make guys feel comfortable as soon as they get over. And that’s how “Dixieland Delight” got on there. We got D-Rob [David Robertson] traded over from the Cubs, and he was an Alabama guy, so we quickly put on “Dixieland Delight.” And it ended up sticking in 2023! But it’s just a good way of getting guys connected — especially, like, Latin players who there’s a language barrier with. So we have Latin songs on there as well, for people to enjoy.
Brandon Marsh #16 and Bryson Stott #5 place a cup on the head of Garrett Stubbs #21 of the Philadelphia Phillies as Stubs gives a post game interview after a win in a game against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field on May 13, 2023 in Denver, Colorado.
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Do you add to it in the offseason?
No, I’ll listen to new music all the time. Unfortunately I feel like there hasn’t been a ton of great music coming out. I don’t know how you feel about that, but…
Well, you’re working for a very specific purpose — maybe people like the new Lana Del Rey album, but I’m sure that’s not gonna make it onto the post-game playlist.
No doubt. Yeah. I’ve been listening to — there’s a lot of good country music that comes out, but like you said, it’s not necessarily the vibe after a win to listen to friggin’ Chris Stapleton or like, a slow Morgan Wallen song or something. But we had big Dua Lipa love in 2022, starting with Kyle Gibson. And so the “Cold Heart” song got put on there. And that’s kind of the vibe we like to go with.
Do songs ever get nixed for being bad luck? Like if you hear a song before a big loss, or it’s the first song that gets played after a big loss, are you ever like, “All right, that song’s no longer part of the vibe, we gotta get it out of here?”
Well, so last year, we tried to get rid of “Dancing on My Own.” Which didn’t go very well at the beginning of the season. And so we ended up putting that back on. But we went through a number of different songs. I know that Juicy J was at one point getting played. I put on “Erryday” by Juicy J after wins. That quickly got axed. There was another J. Cole song that got played after wins — that was just a little too slow. And like, you’re looking around the league, there’s probably songs that get played that are in multiple locker rooms. So we try to keep it independent to ours. I’m sure at one point “All I Do Is Win” was just like the song that everyone played.
We try to stay away from the superstition part. Like, playing “Dancing on My Own” after wins isn’t a superstition for us — it’s just a good vibe. Everyone seems to be having a smile on their face. But also the connection that we got to have with the fans during that was pretty cool.
So I’m sure you’ve talked about it a million times by now, but when did you know that “Dancing on My Own” was connecting in that way?
Well, the funny thing is that all the music that got played in the locker room, not that it wasn’t supposed to get out of the locker room, but that was certainly not the intent at first. We basically were just playing certain songs, I started curating a playlist honestly just to make it easy to play the songs after the game — we could just click play on the playlist and then it would run through all the songs. At no point did I think the entire city was going to find my Spotify! And then realize that there was a “Phils Win” playlist. And then next thing I know, there was 1,000 people liking it, 5,000, 10,000, I think it’s up to like 20 or 25,000 now…
You’re almost up to 30 now.
OK, yeah. So that wasn’t the intent out the gate. But I think it’s a cool way for fans to kinda get a taste of what goes on in the locker room. I think fans enjoy seeing that side of our team. I think they also see that outside of the music, just how we interact with each other on the field. And we have a very unique, fun way of connecting with the people of Philly.
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That song specifically, though — when did you know that that was going to be the song that people most associated with you guys?
I don’t think we ever thought that people were going to associate themselves with it outside the locker room. I think we just kinda felt like it was a good vibe when we were listening to it inside the locker room. And then, very quickly, people found out that that was our song inside the locker room, and then they started connecting with it. That kind of just happened organically, which — I think that’s how the best things in life happen, right? You don’t really intend for them to be a certain way, but just over time, people just get drawn to a certain thing.
In general, just the vibe, the feeling that you get when you hear the song, is upbeat — Tiësto did a great job remixing it because obviously the original is a little slower. So I think the remix gives a good vibe, and all of a sudden you kinda get your head bobbin’, and it gives you good feelings inside, with the association of the winning part of it, along with just the sound that you get from listening to the song, is always positive.
I did notice, skimming the top of the playlist — and I’ve heard it in the locker room too — there’s a lot of dance remixes of non-dance songs. That seems to kind of be a sweet spot for you guys.
Yeah, I personally love bringing a little bit of house vibe to an old song. Seeing some of these new artists grabbing really great classics, and then remixing them with a little more modern house sounds that you weren’t necessarily able to make when they were making those songs, I really enjoy it.
So with 30,000 people following this playlist, do you ever hear it outside the locker room?
Well, after we would win we would go over to Xfinity Live, and immediately the DJ would start playing every single song from the playlist. We would celebrate in the locker room, and then afterwards we would go to Xfinity and celebrate again, and they would bring out those same songs. It was always fun watching the reaction of the fans to certain songs. My favorite song on the playlist [laughs] to have fun with is “D–ked Down in Dallas.”
I mean “Dancing on My Own” is obviously an incredible song, and associated with the whole city. But “D–ked Down in Dallas” is just such a fun song for all of us to have fun to, and whenever we’d go to Xfinity and watch everyone else sing along with it, it was hilarious to us.
Have you thought about what the next in line song would be if “Dancing on My Own” wasn’t working anymore?
I mean, we’ve thought about it plenty, right? We tried to get rid of it this last year. And I don’t even wanna use the words “get rid of,” but we tried to move on from it and find something new and fresh. And we ended up reverting back to it. I think the fans have certain feelings about bringing it back in 2024, which I totally understand — when you don’t win the World Series, a lot of fans feel like it’s not a success. And us players feel the same way, too. But there has been a lot of success — not just with the song, but with the team for the past few years — so we do have a lot of really good memories, and I hope that eventually we just do find a new song that gives us a good vibe and a new good energy that people can connect with.
Wrestling star Chris Jericho’s hard-rock band, Fozzy, has released eight albums since 2000, including three consecutive sets from 2012 to 2017 that charted on the Billboard 200. (2014’s Do You Wanna Start a War fared best, peaking at No. 54.) Fozzy, which most recently released Boombox in 2022, regularly tours the United States, making radio station visits and doing other local promo along the way. Jericho spoke by phone from his Tampa, Fla., home.
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How important for you and Fozzy is the recognition that comes with chart hits?
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We never realized how important rock radio is to a band’s success until we started getting played on rock radio, and that started with “Judas,” back in 2018. We’ve had six Top 10 hits since on the mainstream rock charts. It really makes a difference for the band’s growth — people coming to the shows, the notoriety of the band. We’ve become a radio artist now. Every song we’ve released gets played across the country.
Do you go through all the radio promotion exercises, visiting stations across the country, or do you avoid it?
No, no, no, I don’t avoid anything. Any type of promotion that I can do, I’ll do it. If you put something out, you want to make sure people know it’s out there. You visit a radio station, they’re going to play your song more… It really is a long-term chess game with a lot of strategy involved.
When a Fozzy song hits the charts, how do you celebrate?
It’s always cool. But this is a business. We’re not playing rock star in Fozzy. If we hit No. 1, I’d celebrate, because that’s the highest you can get. “Judas” got to No. 5 and they’re playing it in football and hockey and wrestling stadiums around the world — but how can we do this for the next song? We’re always looking forward. It’s not like, “Wow, we’ve made it because we’re on the radio.” You make it when you get to the Shinedown or Van Halen level, when you’ve had 20 No. 1 songs.
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How much does your recognition as a wrestler help streaming and sales?
We’ve had to work twice as hard to gain people’s respect over the years, just because I’m in the band. But that’s changed, now, where I think Fozzy stands on its own. People aren’t playing our songs on the radio because I’m a wrestler, they’re playing our songs on the radio because people like them and we’re good. Once we got past that initial hump years ago, people look forward to hearing the new Fozzy tunes — they know it’s going to be perfect for radio, it’s going to be catchy, it’s going to be melodic, it’s going to be heavy.
What are you working on now?
Our Boombox record took about three years to make. We were calling it Chinese Fozzocracy because of the pandemic. You didn’t want to put out a record without being able to support it. We put the record out and three songs went Top 10, three more songs went over great live and the other three songs went to the Fozzy Dead Song Graveyard. And that was a shame, because all those songs were great. Now the idea is to do one song at a time. That way, every song gets a chance to live or die on its own.
Former Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds star Bronson Arroyo’s punnily titled 2005 debut, Covering the Bases, included a cover of The Standells’ “Dirty Water” with Red Sox teammates and cracked the Billboard 200. Since his 2017 retirement, Arroyo has added songwriting to his arsenal, putting out 2023’s all-originals collection Some Might Say.
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How do you compare playing baseball and performing with your band onstage?
It’s kind of a strange thing. When you play at the highest level and you’re winning the World Series, or you win 15 games in a Major League season, you feel like you’re at the top of the mountain, doing your best work. I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 27 years old. You never feel like you’re getting to the top. It’s this constant whittling of the wood, being in the basement, practicing over and over again. It doesn’t feel like something you were born to do. It feels like it’s something you’re constantly working to do to get better.
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In baseball, the metrics that show successes are as objective as they can be, but in music, even when you have chart data, it’s totally different, right?
Right. Absolutely. Nobody can deny if you win 15 games in a season or punch out 200. That’s a solid year. No one can take that from you. Music is an art and it’s totally subjective to the listener… If I was one of those kids who was 5 or 6 years old at the piano and I was born with this gift, as I was my athleticism, you might think about it differently. But it’s this constant grind, and I enjoy that.
How does your preparation differ between pitching and performing music?
Leading up to a show, it’s very similar. You get all those jitters. You watch guys in a baseball locker room going into a routine and you watch guys in the band run through their routines. That’s a very similar feeling to standing on the mound and listening to the National Anthem. Once you start pitching, all that stuff eases. It’s just a lot more intimate with the music. What the [baseball] crowd thinks of you in those moments isn’t quite that obvious and personal as when you’re looking people in the eye and thinking, “Are you singing this song along with me?”
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How much promotion do you do for your albums and shows?
Just a little bit. I’m not trying to make money off it. It’s always nice if extra money comes around, but that’s not the main thing. … I did a bunch of radio interviews and newspaper articles with writers from baseball and tried to infiltrate that world a little bit and do stuff that wouldn’t chew up too much of my time. I wasn’t trying to get on a plane and stop at every radio station in the country — which I would if I was 22 and in a van trying to push my music.
You’re on a golf trip now — are you doing music shows, or is this purely vacation?
No, not playing [live music] at all. I have a guitar with me, and these 10 songs we wrote, I’m trying to play them. There’s nowhere I go without having one — you know, those guys who go for a run four or miles every day, and if they don’t do it, it’s a problem. I’m just writing now. I’m going to try to put out 20 to 30 songs. I don’t even know what to do with them, to be honest with you. I’m just going to write a bunch of folk songs. Eventually, I’ll get them out.
Upon ending his 15-year career pitching for the Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants, Zito followed in the musical footsteps of his parents, who both worked with Nat “King” Cole — his father as a conductor-arranger and his mother as a tour singer. Zito, whose country-folkish No Secrets EP hit No. 18 on Billboard‘s Heatseekers Albums charts in 2017, is now a producer-songwriter. The Cy Young Award winner and World Series champion spoke by phone from his Nashville studio.
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It’s legendarily difficult to make it on Music Row. How challenging has it been for you?
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The journey’s always a zigzag. My dream in music was always to be a writer-producer, even in my early baseball days, when I was able to hang out with some amazing producers in L.A. After I came to Nashville in 2015, [I] was a little more into the songwriting, which I view now as so necessary. Writing with a lot of great writers and published writers helped me so much in my role now as a producer.
When your album No Secrets charted in 2017, how did you celebrate?
It was a whirlwind, something we were doing to show more relevance here in the Nashville community, and maybe to some baseball fans who were going to continue to follow me on the music journey. It was honestly a surprise. My manager printed out a framed copy with a picture of the album. I have that in my studio now.
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During your baseball career, were you concentrating on writing songs?
No, I wrote chunks of songs. I wrote some complete songs. Like anyone who’s writing alone, you have a lot of ideas you don’t know how to finish. No one knows this: I actually had four songs I paid a friend of mine in L.A., who’s a great producer, to cut. It was when I was not pitching well at all for the Giants. [The producer] brought in some great [music] players, and it was all over the map — a bossa-nova song, a pop song, a country song. It was just me exploring. I wanted to release it — I even had the album artwork ready to go — but we realized it wasn’t such a good look getting paid $18 million [a year] to pitch and you’re sitting here trying to release music while you’re not doing your actual job.
What’s the best story your parents told you about working with Nat King Cole?
My father told me a story that blew my mind, which is the guy that wrote “Nature Boy.”
Eden Ahbez!
Eden Ahbez, dude! Come on! I’m sure some of the details were fuzzy. My father was Nat’s road conductor, so he was on the road a lot. They were at a venue somewhere and the tour manager, whoever it was, says, “There’s this guy, he wants to talk to you guys, he has a song to play.” They’re kind of curious, so they go out and there was a piano on stage. It was Eden Ahbez. At the time, I guess he was homeless, he had this song, and he said, “I’d love for you to cut it, Nat.” He gets on the piano and plays “Nature Boy” for them. It’s pretty mind-blowing to think that is how “Nature Boy” was born into this world, as far as the industry goes.
Who have you been producing in Nashville?
I have anywhere from two to three sessions a week. I’ll build the track through the day, we’ll get some vocals at the end of the day and I’ll have a nice demo, and then somebody wants to release something, they’ll come back, we’ll do a production deal, we’ll cut final vocals if we have to, add production. There’s an artist-development piece to it with the three artists I’m working with. Lexi Mackenzie, she’s like a country-pop girl, she’s incredible. It’s kind of a blank canvas.
How much do you miss baseball?
Ah, not at all, man. And I don’t mean any disrespect to it. But when I really sit down and watch a game or try to remember how it felt to be on the field — I have my World Series rings in the studio — I do start to miss it. My buddy sent me some TikTok of a pitcher for the A’s throwing 98 miles per hour in a bullpen, which is insane. I thought, “God, that must be so fun, to pump 98 with no adrenaline, just in a bullpen.” I have a complicated relationship with it. I tell myself I don’t miss it, but maybe I do. Maybe I’m trying to fill the gap by being so focused on music.
An elder statesman of NBA stars with rapping side hustles, Hall of Fame center Shaquille O’Neal landed his first hit, “What’s Up Doc? (Can We Rock),” on MTV in 1993, and it peaked at No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100. He has four other Hot 100 songs to his name and four Billboard 200 […]
Since investing in the Chicago Sky in 2006, singer Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child fame has sung the national anthem at multiple games, joined a Sky star in a photo-op with local high school players, hung out with fans at a meet-and-greet — and, of course, enjoyed the best seats in the house.
With her minority stake in the 2021 WNBA champion team, Williams belongs to an exclusive group of pop stars who own a slice of a sports team, including Usher, J. Cole, Pitbull, Fergie, Marc Anthony and Justin Timberlake. And with the Sky recently valued at $85 million, her investment is paying off in multiple ways.
“It checks a lot of the boxes — [she] is from the city, a fan of the sport, a woman, a member of an iconic group,” says Jonathan Azu, founder and CEO of Culture Collective, which manages Williams. “It has the hallmarks of why you would do something like that: ‘I’m associated with this team, so it brings a lot of value to my brand.’ ”
Michelle Williams speaks to kids at a the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boys and Girls Club Monday, Feb. 27, 2006 in Chicago.
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For an artist, that kind of value is both figurative and literal. Whether it’s Usher buying a small stake in the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, Anthony and Fergie becoming minority owners of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, Cole buying into the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets or Pitbull becoming co-owner of NASCAR’s Trackhouse Racing Team, money is a primary motivator.
“The stock market can go down, but the value of, say, the Texas Rangers is not going to go down,” says Michael Rapkoch, founder and CEO of Dallas-based Sports Value Consulting. Usher’s $9 million Cavs investment, for instance, may have more than quadrupled in value since he first made it in 2005, according to Forbes estimates. “I’m very happy to say that I don’t just have a basketball team, I have a championship team,” Usher tells Billboard, noting the Cavs won in 2016 under his watch. “That legacy is associated with something that I made an investment in.”
Perhaps the best-known artist-turned-team owner is Jay-Z, who spent $1 million on a small stake in the NBA’s Nets in 2004, helped move the franchise from New Jersey to his native Brooklyn, then divested from the team in 2013 to avoid a conflict of interest with his Roc Nation Sports agency. His windfall from that deal, according to Forbes, was an estimated $1.4 million.
Marc Anthony attends the NFL, ESPN/ESPN Deportes and the Miami Dolphins press conference at the Time Warner Center on July 21, 2009 in New York City.
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Investing in a team can also mean easy self-marketing. When Timberlake, whose investing group owns a reported 2.8% of his hometown NBA team, the Memphis Grizzlies, played camera operator at home games, Sports Illustrated covered the story. “Sports is entertainment. There is crossover at every level,” Mark Cuban, who recently sold his majority stake in the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks for a reported $3.5 billion, tells Billboard.
That said, even a minority stake can be risky — “no different than any business,” as Cuban says. “If it’s not well run [and] customers aren’t happy, you can lose a lot of money.” That’s why none of longtime Bay Area music business manager Tim Jorstad’s clients have ever bought stakes in teams, even though many of his clients, which include the Doobie Brothers, Jefferson Airplane and members of Journey and the Grateful Dead, are regional sports fans.
Nonetheless, the perks tend to outweigh the potential downside for artists craving a piece of the sports pie. “It’s a fun investment. [Artist-owners] go to a lot of games and get to sit in the owners’ box and go onto the field and schmooze,” Jorstad says. “There are very few other normal investments where you get that kind of public exposure.”
J. Cole during the Miami Heat vs Charlotte Hornets game at FTX Arena on November 10, 2022 in Miami, Florida.
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Additional reporting by Gail Mitchell.
This story will appear in the Feb. 10, 2024, issue of Billboard.
The $10 billion-a-year sports agency business is almost as hard to break into as the big leagues themselves — the gatekeepers are entrenched and powerful, and the cost of competing with them can be prohibitive. Right now, though, a growing disconnect between athletes and agents — players want their agents to find them lucrative ways to leverage their fame, while agents want to focus on the high-dollar contracts — is creating opportunities for entrepreneurs to disrupt the business. Some of them are coming from the music industry, leveraging their own cultural cachet to find clients and opportunities, including Jay-Z, whose Roc Nation includes a sports agency business; Young Money APAA Sports; and Quality Control Sports. More music stars are on their way this year too.
The business is now dominated by five firms — CAA Sports, Wasserman Sports, WME Sports, Excel Sports and Octagon — which together generate half of the $6 billion in commissions that the top 20 firms collected, according to Forbes. On the surface, these companies operate a bit like music and film/TV agencies, where executives identify opportunities for their clients and negotiate on their behalf. But the vast majority of the money comes from long-term player contracts that deliver giant commissions, and many athletes think this leads agents to ignore sports-adjacent opportunities and investments. Roc Nation and Rich Paul’s Klutch Sports, built on their reputation for combining sports and entertainment, used this to challenge the entrenched players, successfully enough that they are now ranked No. 7 and No. 9 by revenue, respectively, according to Forbes.
Does that mean other musicians and music executives will follow their lead — or even that they should? Launching a sports agency is expensive — it can take between $40 million and $50 million, according to Forbes, which is a big bet even for most stars. So that usually means finding additional investors, in the form of financial backers or other entrepreneurs, plus athletes who are either looking for an agent or a new one.
Roc Nation, which had a rock-solid source of both cash and credibility in Jay-Z, entered the sports business in 2013, five years after the company’s launch, with four-time All-Star Yankees second baseman Robinson Canó. Its sports division now has 190 clients, including Charlotte Hornets point guard LaMelo Ball and New York Giants running back Saquon Barkley, and about $2 billion in player salaries and another $500 million in sponsorships and nonsalary deals, according to Forbes, which estimates that the company’s sports operations generate $203 million a year. (Roc Nation declined to comment on its finances.) Klutch Sports, where Paul is agent and manager for LeBron James, as well as a board member for Live Nation Entertainment, generates about half that.
That kind of success brings competition, including from music executives Kevin “Coach K” Lee and Pierre “P” Thomas, who launched Quality Control Sports in 2019, four years before HYBE purchased their company. Their agency’s clients include New Orleans Saints running back Alvin Kamara and Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Richie James. The Lil Wayne-owned Young Money APAA Sports has also put points on the board by signing University of Miami’s Leonard Taylor III ahead of the 2024 NFL draft.
That doesn’t mean every venture succeeds, though. Jeezy started his Sports 99 agency in 2019, but it closed during the pandemic, and Kanye West’s Donda Sports, launched in 2022 with basketball players Aaron Donald and Jaylen Brown, imploded within months after West made a series of antisemitic comments.
The fast-paced evolution of both the sports and music businesses may continue to tempt musicians with money and influence, but anyone who enters the sports agency business, no matter how famous, will probably do so as an underdog.
This story will appear in the Feb. 10, 2024, issue of Billboard.
An elite set of songs — like Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down For What” — have become so known as sports anthems that they’re almost divorced from the original context in which they were released. To take off in a sports setting, plenty of factors must align — not just the fundamentals of what makes a song appealing to the masses, but also hard work behind the scenes and a little luck. But if sports teams, TV networks and of course fanbases get behind them, these tracks get massive boosts.
The songs below are some of the current standouts blasting in stadiums around the country — and likely to do so for a long time.
Key Glock, “Let’s Go”
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“The infectious beat and earworm chorus make it a lock — either for pro athletes’ stadium walkouts or intramural athletes getting ready to put up a very solid five points at the YMCA rec league, like myself,” EMPIRE’s Harrison Golding says.
Jelly Roll, “Need a Favor”
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CAA’s Dave Aussenberg calls the country-rock hit “the most under-the-radar anthem for all sports fans. As the clock winds down and the team is down to its last play, this is the soundtrack. It was all I could think about during the recent, incredible College Football Playoff semifinal games.”
Creed, “Higher”
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Thanks in large part to the Texas Rangers — both fans in the stands who sang along to it karaoke-style and players who belted it in the locker room post-World Series win — the rock band’s grandiose 1999 hit is experiencing a resurgence “equal parts hilarious and awesome,” Def Jam’s Gabe Tesoriero says. “The memes re-creating [Creed’s] iconic, bizarre Thanksgiving halftime performance” from 2001 “ruled my timeline [this year].”
Sheck Wes, “Mo Bamba”
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“That is becoming a ‘Seven Nation Army,’ ” Interscope’s David Nieman says. “It’s a third-down stop song; it gets the people going. We took Sheck when that song first came out to St. John’s [University] to do Midnight Madness for the basketball team, and in that moment, I realized how big of a stadium anthem that was going to be when the kids were singing back along with it, the way it sounded and the bravado of it all.”
Saweetie & P-Lo, “Do It For The Bay”
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Warner Records worked with the NFC champion San Francisco 49ers on this anthem for the football team’s playoff run by Bay Area natives Saweetie and P-Lo, which lined up with the team’s “Do It For The Bay” marketing campaign — and the song quickly took off, impacting Rhythmic Airplay and Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and becoming a rallying cry for the team’s fans. “When you have an artist that has a personal tie to a sports organization and is genuinely excited to get in the studio and write a song for them, you end up with something unique and authentic that the fans and community will support,” says Warner’s vp of brand partnerships and ad sync Rob Santini. “Saweetie’s grandfather won a Super Bowl for the 49ers and her uncle is currently a coach on the team, so there was a real connection there.”
Fast Life Yungstaz, “Swag Surfin’ ”
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The Atlanta hip-hop trio’s 2009 track gained popularity at historically Black college and university parties, became an anthem for teams like the Chicago Bears and the Washington Mystics and is now in the spotlight thanks to the Kansas City Chiefs. “Since I’ve been here, it has been a huge fourth-quarter, big-time moment, big-time drive in the game for our defense” hype song, the team’s Travis Kelce said on the New Heights podcast in January. Its signature wave-like dance can “make the stadium feel like chaos.” As a widely circulated game clip showed, even Taylor Swift and Kelce’s mother got in on it recently.
This story will appear in the Feb. 10, 2024, issue of Billboard.
It was May 1977, and Queen had just finished its encore at Bingley Hall in the English town of Stafford when the crowd, rather than dispersing and heading home, began to sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Originally featured in the 1945 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Carousel, Gerry & The Pacemakers had popularized the tune with their 1963 version, and shortly after, it became an anthem of the British soccer club Liverpool FC. The spontaneous incident at Bingley Hall would forever change the cultural landscape: It inspired singer Freddie Mercury and guitarist Brian May to write two of Queen’s most iconic songs.
“The story we’ve been told is that Brian and Freddie said, ‘Why don’t we write our own anthems?’ ” says Dominic Griffin, vp of licensing at Disney Music Group, which owns the North American rights to Queen’s music. “So Brian wrote ‘We Will Rock You,’ Freddie wrote ‘We Are the Champions,’ and they started finishing their shows with those. I’m not sure if there was one particular moment, but the band began to realize that there was not much difference between the crowd at a rock show and the crowd at a football game. It was having the same reaction.”
Whether due to its stomp-clap beat, call-to-action lyrics or simple melody — or more likely a combination of all three — “We Will Rock You” in particular became one of the most widely recognized songs in history, especially at sporting events, where it blares nightly in arenas and stadiums around the world. According to BMI, “We Will Rock You” is the song in the performing rights organization’s 22 million-plus-track repertoire most played at NHL, NFL and MLB games. It accumulated over 9.5 million U.S. radio and TV feature performances from its 1977 release through the third quarter of 2023.
That’s no accident. Since acquiring Queen’s catalog in 1990, both Disney and the band have encouraged radio stations to use “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” in promos, allowed sports stadiums and teams to use them to soundtrack highlights and hype videos (which require additional approval, separate from the blanket public performance license that all venues need to simply play a song in a public space) and licensed them to now-classic sports films like The Mighty Ducks, Any Given Sunday and The Replacements. The label’s research data, including figures from Radio Disney, showed that all generations reacted to the songs.
“I think it was a way for sports teams to play something that appeals to everyone in the venue,” Griffin says. “Those Queen songs tick all the boxes because the lyric is great for sporting events and they’re just natural anthems, and the band went out to write an anthem for an arena that turned into a sports anthem.”
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In the decades since, an elite set of songs like these has become a genre unto itself, so known as sports anthems that they’re almost divorced from the original context in which they were released — call it “the Jock Jams effect,” after the compilation albums from the mid-’90s that featured hype-up tracks like House of Pain’s “Jump Around” and Tag Team’s “Whoomp! (There It Is).” But more modern songs have also joined the pantheon in recent years, like The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What,” which are near-omnipresent at current sports games.
“It becomes folk music when things like that happen,” Jack White said of “Seven Nation Army” on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast in 2022. “It just becomes ubiquitous. I’m sure many people who are chanting the melody have no idea what the song is or where it came from or why, or whatever — it doesn’t matter anymore, and that’s just amazing.”
“We’ve been fortunate that several of Lil Jon’s songs have become incredible stadium anthems over the years,” says the artist’s manager, Rob Mac. “With ‘Turn Down for What,’ we knew that record felt massive, but the video really helped to boost the song as well. His music has always hyped up fans and crowds — his voice and energy [lend themselves] to that, and people really embrace and connect with it. His music became part of the experience inside a stadium.”
Still, plenty of factors must align — not just the fundamentals of what makes a song appealing to the masses, but also hard work behind the scenes and a little luck — for a song to take off in a sports setting. Labels are constantly pitching not just legacy artists, but new acts and songs to local teams and TV networks hoping for a placement. If a song makes the cut, it can be a massive boost for an artist.
“We spend a lot of time trying to get our new artists played inside sporting arenas because you’re reaching anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 people at a time and you’ve got a captive audience who can’t turn the radio off,” says Griffin, noting the success Disney has had with acts like Demi Lovato, almost monday and Grace Potter, whose “The Lion, the Beast, the Beat” soundtracked multiple promos for the Detroit Lions during this year’s NFL playoffs. “Any time you can get your music in front of that many thousands of people, it certainly helps with recognition.”
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Take “Swag Surfin’ ” by Fast Life Yungstaz, for one extreme example: The song has been a staple at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium for a few years now, played when the defense needs a big stop or the crowd needs an energy boost. In the weeks leading up to the NFL playoffs, the song averaged between 350,000 and 400,000 on-demand streams per week; that number jumped to over 1 million the week the Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins in the playoffs, when Taylor Swift was seen doing the song’s signature dance alongside Chiefs fans.
“In the arena business, when you’ve got 20,000 or 40,000 people and you’re trying to get them to do something, sometimes it’s the big, dumb gesture that really wins the day. Whether it’s some goofy guy dancing on the scoreboard or something that’s telling you to get up and yell, or a song that’s got a simple melody where everybody can participate, that really seems to be the most effective,” says Ray Castoldi, who has been Madison Square Garden’s music director/organist since 1989; in his role, he also frequently selects the music for New York Knicks and New York Rangers games and occasionally plays the organ for the New York Mets at Citi Field.
Castoldi says he’s constantly looking for new songs to add to his game playlist and that he regularly tests out new material in the Garden — but that the rotation remains pretty steady, with around 300 songs on tap for any given game. “Arena standards are songs that appeal on such a wide basis that you almost can’t help yourself — it’s something in human nature where it motivates a large group of people,” he says. “I always see the equation as: You play the music for this huge assemblage of people and you want to get them all riled up and get their energy going, and then they give that energy to the players.”
And once a song reaches that threshold, it achieves a new, almost mythic status that can long outshine the rest of an artist’s oeuvre. House of Pain racked up 87 million on-demand U.S. streams in 2023, according to Luminate; 75 million of those were for “Jump Around.” Even for an act as beloved and popular as Queen, which tallied 1.3 billion streams in 2023, 8% of its streams were “We Will Rock You.” As Brian May said in 2017 — in an interview after Billboard named that song the No. 1 jock jam of all time — “They’re beyond hits. We don’t have to sell them in any way.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 10, 2024, issue of Billboard.
For Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles fans — and any football lover, really — last year’s Super Bowl LVII was a thrilling, down-to-the-wire classic. But as the game, airing on FOX Sports and tied at 35, cut to commercial break at the two-minute warning, tense viewers might’ve felt an unexpected wave of calm. The buttery-smooth lick from “Hungersite,” one of the most popular tracks by the exploding jam band Goose, played as the stressed visages of head coaches Andy Reid and Nick Sirianni gave way to ads.
“It was so surreal to hear our song during the Super Bowl,” Goose singer-guitarist Rick Mitarotonda tells Billboard. “We are very thankful to FOX Sports for supporting what we do and exposing so many bands in the genre to the masses.”
Goose posted the snippet to Instagram and reached out to FOX Sports to express its gratitude — all in a day’s work for Jacob Ullman, FOX Sports senior vp of production and talent development, and Jake Jolivette, a producer at the network. Through their production roles on NFL games, Ullman and Jolivette have caught the attention of astute listeners with secondslong jam band synchs — from titans like the Grateful Dead and Phish to cultier acts like Umphrey’s McGee and moe. — for the past several years.
Ullman, 50, saw his first Dead show at age 12 when his father took him to see the band at Southern California’s Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre in 1985. Jolivette, 49, got into the band as a Midwestern college student, attending his first show in 1992 (three years before Jerry Garcia died); his college years also coincided with Phish’s rise, and the Vermont band’s “communal” shows hooked him. “It’s almost like going to a live sporting event,” he observes.
Ullman began working at FOX Sports when the network launched in 1994, and Jolivette landed there a decade later. The former recalls the thrill of synching a jam-adjacent artist early on: When he integrated Dave Matthews Band’s “Tripping Billies” into a hockey broadcast in 1996, he was amazed “that you can collide your work life, your passion for sports and your passion for music in one place.” But FOX Sports wouldn’t become known for its sly jam band integrations until years later, after Ullman and Jolivette had both risen through the ranks and found themselves working together on NFL and NASCAR broadcasts.
For many viewers, the first clue that the FOX Sports edit bay might be tie-dye-friendly came during 2017’s Super Bowl LI, in a produced pregame video narrated by actor Ving Rhames introducing the competing New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons. Jolivette used Audioslave’s “Cochise” for the Patriots — and Phish’s exuberant “Tweezer Reprise” for the Falcons. Phish frontman Trey Anastasio and the band’s former longtime road manager, Brad Sands, watched the show, and a screenshotted text thread between them circulated on jam-loving corners of the internet. (Sands said, “Falcons have to win now right?” and Anastasio agreed.) “I love ‘Tweezer.’ I love how it builds,” says Jolivette before adding with a chuckle, “Mind you, my editor hated the song — but I still got it in.”
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In 2018, FOX Sports inked a five-year deal with the NFL to air Thursday Night Football, and Ullman and Jolivette became heavily involved in the broadcasts. That’s when their jam band synchs really took off. “We’d sneak a couple of [songs] in there — all of a sudden, you’re getting texts,” says Jolivette with still-palpable amazement. “That’s when I figured out that this was something that was brewing that people could hear.”
When the pandemic hit, Ullman, who had hung out with the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir at NASCAR events over the years, convinced the musician through his manager to record a solo performance of the national anthem for the late-March 2020 broadcast of an iRacing Pro Invitational simulated race. Later that year, Ullman and Jolivette’s colleagues Joe Carpenter (senior audio engineer) and Bryan Biederman (director) — fellow FOX Sports Deadheads who work on the network’s MLB broadcasts — integrated a slew of Dead songs into the 2020 World Series. Sensing the public’s interest, FOX uploaded a supercut of the synchs — among them “Shakedown Street,” “Sugar Magnolia” and “Althea” — to its social media, with corresponding game footage nested within the band’s iconic “Steal Your Face” logo.
“Between that and what we were doing on Thursday Night Football, that year was probably where a lot of this exploded,” Ullman says. It was a feedback loop of sorts: The more FOX Sports integrated jam bands, the more positive reinforcement it received.
Still, in the tricky world of TV licensing, the network’s ’heads need supportive — or at least tolerant — colleagues to facilitate clearances. For that, they work with a team that includes vp of music Nicole de la Torriente-Nelson, who leads negotiations with publishers and labels, and associate director Yvonne Wagoner, who prepares approved playlists for broadcast teams. Wagoner collaborates with crews to construct eclectic playlists — an amalgam of current hits, old classics, songs for specific situations like scoring and situational matches for game location and weather — and solicits requests. While some core songs remain throughout a season, there’s also turnover, and Wagoner refers potential new songs to de la Torriente-Nelson and her colleagues, who secure the applicable rights. Licensing terms vary, but songs are often cleared for a season’s entirety, with fees paid out on a per-use basis (the higher-profile the game, the higher the synch rate).
Take FOX Sports’ week 15 Buffalo Bills-Dallas Cowboys broadcast. Jolivette wanted to use a song by Buffalo jam band moe. for the Bills home game, so he asked Wagoner to clear the group’s “Happy Hour Hero.” She passed along the request to de la Torriente-Nelson, whose team secured the rights, and Jolivette and senior audio mixer Jamie McCombs — not a jam fan per se, though he admits Jolivette has “turned me on to some really good stuff” — prepped the few seconds that would ultimately air. Late in the first quarter of the Dec. 17 game, with the Bills up 7-0, “Hero” led into a commercial break. Watching was moe. guitarist Al Schnier, who posted a video of his TV screen to Instagram with the caption “Bills + moe. + winning = Happy Hour Hero.”
Integrations like that really are by jam band fans, for jam band fans. Ullman’s team doesn’t feel bound to the Dead or Phish, or even to the most popular tracks in their respective discographies; in the Jan. 14 Dallas Cowboys-Green Bay Packers playoff game, FOX Sports used the Dead’s “Saint of Circumstance” and Phish’s “Axilla,” hardly the best-known songs by either group. Jolivette and his colleagues seek out the best secondslong snippets, wherever they may come from. As he explains of “Saint of Circumstance,” “The part we use, it hits. If you’ve seen that in concert, you know that’s one of the great transitions. That, to me, is what makes that a great song to use.”
And in the ultimate validation of their work, one of their heroes is returning the fandom. “When you think about it, the music we make isn’t unlike a sporting event,” Weir, who was spotted with the FOX Sports team on the sideline at January’s NFC Championship game, tells Billboard. “On a good night, you don’t really know where it’s going to go — and getting wherever it’s going is going to be different every time to boot.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 10, 2024, issue of Billboard.
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