Esports World Cup 2025: Music Is in the Sport's DNA Entertainment is intrinsic with esports, blending its passion and diversity By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Thursday, August 14, 2025 - 7:00 am
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Music and broadcast sports have a long and evolutionary relationship. From Take Me Out to the Ballgame to team-centric theme songs like Meet the Mets, the music through midcentury was mostly Tin Pan Alley-conventional and ear-wormy jingles.
Once the MTV era began and radio and television became media, however, sport's relationship with music changed. Different sports embraced different genres: for example, relentless hip-hop underscores the NBA, and the NFL's heroic horns have given way to pop-country stars warbling its theme songs. In the process, live music has become part and parcel of sport's biggest events, from the Super Bowl Halftime Show to league drafts resembling three-day music festivals.
The Esports World Cup 2025 kicked off on July 10 with a sold-out Opening Ceremony in Riyadh.
As videogaming moved from marginal to mainstream, music became esports' distinguishing characteristic. Its fans and players are digital natives who are often interchangeable, and music was integral to the culture from the get-go. Per Luminate's analysis of that symbiosis, videogames can actually break new music and artists, even as those music performers bring new players to game titles. Last year's Fortnite Remix - which brought together such artists as Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Ice Spice, and Juice WRLD - promoted those artists while attracting millions of new followers to the game. The synergy between sports and music is impacting both, say production executives of the Esports World Cup (EWC).
I think it's harder and harder to classify what a [music] genre even is now, says Viranda Tantula, executive creative director, EWC, and de facto music supervisor for the event, whose second iteration is taking place now (July 7-Aug. 24, streaming on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok Live, and other platforms) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, whose Public Investment Fund finances the seven-week-long tournament's $70 million purse.
Esports and Genres Esports itself is hard to classify. EWC represents 25 titles across gaming's multiple categories, from shooters to fantasy to conventional sports. Thus, Tantula says, the tournament's musical diversity is not only understandable but unsurprising.
EWC's Viranda Tantula: What has been really fun and what I love [about the EWC] is the hybridization, the connection point between various parts of culture.
What has been really fun and what I love is the hybridization, the connection point between various parts of culture, he observes, as once-clearly siloed categories like country and hip-hop now conjoin regularly. I love fusing things. And so music-wise, I think it's harder and harder to classify what a genre even is, right?
Even the event's own theme song - Til My Fingers Bleed performed by Dino of Seventeen, Duckwrth, and The Word Alive - is a genre mash and purposeful in its inclusiveness.
Is it an alternative song? Is it a K-pop song? Is it a rap song? Tantula wonders. I'm not really sure, but I think what's cool about that is, it represents that thing you get from gaming, which is, [when] you jump into the [game] lobby, you don't know who you're going to play with. You have some kid in California, you have some kid in Croatia, and some kid in Korea. It's awesome.
That observation echoes that spoken by pioneering Black country artist Linda Martell at the beginning of the track SPAGHETI on Beyonce's crossover Country Carter LP: Genres are a funny little concept, aren't they?
Post Time The choice of Post Malone as marquee featured artist for the EWC Opening Ceremony is more than marketing. Ariel Horn, executive producer, entertainment, EWC, describes the artist as a gamer himself, which adds authenticity to the choice.
Post Malone was featured artist at the Esports World Cup 2025 Opening Ceremony.
But Malone is also a genre shape-shifter. He began his career in rap and hip-hop but last year veered into the fast-rising country category, piggybacking on Beyonc 's turn in that direction and joining other country stars in opening Posty's, his own bar on Nashville's main street. Malone's credibility in country and gaming is enhanced by both his performance of America the Beautiful at Super Bowl LVIII in 2024 and his song Fortnight. But what might seem like careful career calculation is attenuated by the fact that his first-ever track, White Iverson, released in 2015, is an allusion to NBA Hall of Famer Allen Iverson. Sports, of one sort or another, seem to be in his DNA.
These and other elements around the tournament's music make its decisions in that regard feel organic rather than calibrated, compared with, say, the strategic planning that goes into choosing a Super Bowl Halftime Show. The Super Bowl decisions are based not only on practical factors, such as sales and streaming numbers and sponsor alignments, but also on virality and cultural impacts, as well as the transactional equation, especially in recent years, of how good the affiliation is for the artist as well as for the NFL.
(Artists who have turned down Super Bowl halftime invitations include Taylor Swift, Cardi B, Outkast, and Dolly Parton.)
Making Connections Sports is a universal language, and so is music, notes Horn, who has worked on four Olympics productions and the Sunday Night Football franchise for NBC Sports. It's about finding the passion in the audience and finding the right ways to connect that passion to the content you're creating.
EWC's Ariel Horn: Sports is a universal language, and so is music, and so it'
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Esports World Cup 2025: Music Is in the Sport's DNA Entertainment is intrinsic with esports, blending its passion and diversity By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
