
Tech Focus: Production Music, Part 1 - Sports Is Big Part of the Industry's Resurgence Amidst a revolution in genres and distribution, copyright issues are a sour note By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Wednesday, May 11, 2022 - 7:00 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
You don't have to be in the music business to have noticed the eye-watering amounts of money poured into legacy music catalogs lately. Artists including Paul Simon ($250 million), Bob Dylan ($325 million), and Bruce Springsteen ($550 million) have pushed total catalog sales into the billions of dollars at a time when the U.S. music industry hit a 22-year high of $15 billion in sales and the global music business reached $26 billion last year.
And the sports-music business has had a big share in that growth.
It has been busy pretty much nonstop for a year, says Matthew Gutknecht, director, sports entertainment, APM Music. We anticipate high demand for even more [music] content in coming months.
APM is a massive repository of more than 1 million tracks of both custom and catalog music, mostly from its joint owners, Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing, two of the so-called Big Three remaining legacy-era record labels. That number was whittled down from a dozen three decades ago through an often torturous consolidation that saw the entire industry fall from the CD-induced highs of the 1990s to an endangered species hunted by internet startups like Napster at the turn of the century, only to return stronger than ever in a Wall Street-fueled happy ending.
The music industry's reprise coincided with the ascension of broadcast sports over the past 20 years, which reached an estimated value of $480 billion-$620 billion.
Back to Normal While music in general is having a Wall Street moment, production-music executives are relieved to find that its use for sports is becoming more frequent and more conventional after two years of artificial crowd sounds and other ways that audio elements were deployed to create a sense of normalcy. That allows more-nuanced changes in music choices to be noticed.
For instance, there is a growing use of high-energy rock music in broadcast sports, even in traditionally staid sports like golf, notes Peter Alexander, sales manager, Sound Ideas. His company is the umbrella for producers The Hollywood Edge, Westar Music, and the recently acquired Sound Dogs and provides content to collegiate customers such as Georgia Tech, Wake Forest Athletics, and Hofstra University.
Even in basketball, which has been mostly hip-hop for years, and especially lately in collegiate sports, in any situation where they want to get the crowd up quickly, he says, there has been less reliance on sound effects and more on certain types of music, like classic rock, to accomplish that.
Buttressing that case is rock's resurgence elsewhere in culture, with bands like Foo Fighters and Greta Van Fleet topping charts.
Rock may be ascendant for the moment, but a broader range of music genres has been applied to sports broadcasts in the past year. That's partly due to an effort to attract wider audiences and broaden sports' appeal to more and different demographics, according to Dan Cross, music director, Megatrax.
We have noticed not only an uptick in songs but also a widening of the styles in general, he explains. Where it used to lean primarily into rock, hip-hop, and orchestral/hybrid thematic music, there has been a growing trend towards styles like dance-pop, EDM, and other more pop styles, both vocal and instrumental. It's almost like there are no more designated lanes for sports music, and crossovers are abundant. Going to commercial one time could be your typical sports theme and then the next could be the new Dua Lipa single. It's all over the map.
Stephen Arnold Music's Whitney Arnold: Production music has to meet the same standards as what fans hear on the radio.
Whitney Arnold, VP, music services, Stephen Arnold Music, a vendor of custom music for NBC Sports, CNN Sports, ESPN, and others, says production music's mission now that broadcast sports are back nearly to normal is to communicate and re-establish the energy that went missing during COVID. What's also changing is the modernization of the productions themselves.
The genres for various sports haven't really changed, he observes. You still have hip-hop or basketball and so on. But there are more hybrid sounds being used, more syncopated beats, just more in the way of production values. We've done the same with our productions to reflect that. Production music has to meet the same standards as what fans hear on the radio.
Avoiding Copyright Infringement The growing synergy between music and sports is highlighted by APM Music's milestone arrangement with the National Hockey League. Under the exclusive seven-year deal signed in 2021, the Hollywood-based production-music supplier provides all the music used by the NHL and its 32 teams, collectively and individually, for broadcast, in-venue, commercial, promotional, and social-media applications. At the time, Gutknecht referred to the contract as the soundtrack for a new era in the NHL.
APM Music's Matthew Gutknecht: The rules of the game have changed. We interface with legal departments far more now than in the past.
He alluded to possible new deals with other sports entities in the near future, discussions he says today are ongoing. The discussions stem from a core issue that sports leagues, venues, and broadcasters have shared in recent years: prerecorded copyrighted music played in a stadium or arena during a broadcast leaks through the many open broadcast microphones at the venues into televised audio, creating a de facto copyright infringement. Consequently, litigation between those entities and
More from Sports Video Group
01/07/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Spyrosoft's Jonathan Witty on Futher Business Exp...
01/07/2025
The NIL Effect: How the Shifting Business of College Athletics Impacts On-Campus...
01/07/2025
Cherry on the cake: Inside the technical production of the Tour de France 2025 w...
01/07/2025
NESN's Josh Jun on Keeping Alternative Broadcasts Fresh for Boston Red Sox, ...
01/07/2025
TNT Sports Races Back Into NASCAR With Fresh Look, Familiar Edge Production approach emphasizes creative freedom, bold storytelling, casual-fan-friendly tone B...
27/06/2025
How smarter compression is creating a sustainable future By Michael Burns
Monday, June 23, 2025 - 14:13
Print This Story
Live sport is especially vulnerab...
27/06/2025
Behind the Mic: FOX Sports Ratchets Up UEFA Women's EURO 2025 With Top-Class...
27/06/2025
RTL Group To Acquire Sky Deutschland By George Bevir, Editorial Director, SVG Europe
Friday, June 27, 2025 - 8:00 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story ...
27/06/2025
Frictionless, At Scale: The Current State of Live Video Streaming Techology Leaders from Bitmovin, Comcast Technology Solutions, Harmonic, IMAX, and Phenix brea...
27/06/2025
Marquee Sports Network's Nick Steger on Meeting the Moment of the Contending...
27/06/2025
NHL Draft 2025: The League Is Primed for First Decentralized Draft in Non-Pandem...
26/06/2025
10th-Annual SVG Regional Sports Production Summit Presents Useful Roadmap for th...
26/06/2025
The Big Cloud Debate: Public vs. Private vs. Hybrid Tech leaders from CineSys, Diversified, and Net Insight breaks down all flavors of cloud By Jason Dachman, ...
26/06/2025
Program Productions' Jess Kowatch on Training the Next and Current Gener...
25/06/2025
SVG College Summit 2025: Select Sessions Now Available to Watch on SVG PLAY Tackling the latest in college sports video: NIL, live production, virtual productio...
25/06/2025
ESPN Is Set To Bring AR Graphics to Wimbledon, Revamps Bunker and Studio 18 VO B...
24/06/2025
2025 NBA Draft: ABC/ESPN Prepares for Two-Day Draft at Barclays Center Partners Game Creek Video, CP Communications, NEP Specialty Capture will be on hand By M...
24/06/2025
Cloud Broadcast Tech Update: Google Cloud's Jane Day on the Impact of AI on ...
24/06/2025
Cloud Broadcast Tech Update: AWS's Dana LaGattuta on Data-Driven Innovation ...
24/06/2025
Lions live: Dublin opener sees Sky Sports take remote route By Fergal Ringrose ...
24/06/2025
Pumas maul Lions as S4C and TG4 deliver first-ever joint host in Dublin By Ferg...
24/06/2025
ABC/ESPN Prepares for 2025 NBA Draft, the First at Barclays Center Partners Game Creek Video, CP Communications, NEP Specialty Capture will be on hand By Mark ...
23/06/2025
Adventures in Live Cloud Production: Stories From the Trenches with MLB, NHL, NB...
23/06/2025
Finding the edge: How Badger & Combes produces live-streamed coverage of county ...
23/06/2025
Masters of Madness: New football format shakes up the rules of sportainment By Adrian Pennington
Monday, June 16, 2025 - 11:38
Print This Story
The ball i...
23/06/2025
New State-of-the-Art Mountain Media Center Launches in Former Starz Encore Build...
23/06/2025
ESPN Says Goodbye to Seaport Studios, Hello to New State-of-the-Art Production F...
20/06/2025
Feeling Unlimited, Part 1: Athletes Unlimited Softball League Deploys Remote Pro...
20/06/2025
A True Test? Cricket's Growth on the Global Stage and the Role Broadcast Can...
20/06/2025
Sky Sports goes large for the British & Irish Lions Tour with AR graphics, UHD a...
20/06/2025
ESPN's Men's College World Series Finals Coverage Combines Innovation, L...
19/06/2025
SVG Rewind: PGA Tour Introduces Drone AR Smart Tracing, Reflects on Winning Geor...
18/06/2025
Technology focus: Fan expectations drive advances in the in-stadium experience By Jo Ruddock
Tuesday, June 3, 2025 - 08:36
Print This Story
For years, att...
18/06/2025
Making connections: How stadiums are meeting the ever-growing demand for data an...
18/06/2025
SVG Venues & Teams Summit Keynote: RWS Global Powers the Stadium Environment at ...
18/06/2025
SVG Rewind: Behind the Scenes of Producing Tottenham Hotspur's Europa League...
17/06/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Mercury Intermedia's Tom Richardson, Mike Ligon o...
17/06/2025
Total Sports Performance from Relo Metrics, VideoAmp, Offers Next-Level Media, B...
17/06/2025
From Stage to Stream: Producing Live Esports Events in 2025 Leaders from ESL FACEIT Group, Riot Games, and more break down the latest trends By Jason Dachman, ...
17/06/2025
Inside FIFA 2025 Club World Cup Operations With FIFA's Oscar Sanchez, HBS...
17/06/2025
Production ambitions: Over Exposed on making the National League Promotion Final...
17/06/2025
DAZN Brings Global Ambition to U.S. Soil With Production of 2025 FIFA Club World...
17/06/2025
Diversified's Christine Williamson on How UT's New State-of-the-Art Prod...
16/06/2025
Grass Valley 4K Cameras Head to Greece for View Master Events' New Productio...
16/06/2025
Behind The Broadcast Booth, Ep. 3: Golf. My Future. My Game. Founder and CEO Cra...
16/06/2025
The REMI Revolution Is Here: How Remote Production Technology in Esports Pioneer...
16/06/2025
From Super Bowl to Indy 500, New Orleans Artist Frenchy' Captures Energy of...
16/06/2025
NFL Films Enhances Post Studio With Dolby Atmos Audio Forty-three channels of audio enable the facility to migrate to immersive By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Mo...
16/06/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Storj's David Colantuoni on Expanding Cloud-Based...