NFL Kickoff 2019: Jay-Z Deal With NFL Puts Rap at Top of Sports’ Playlist

Stadium sound systems are tuning up to accommodate the ‘boom at the bottom’

The partnership between rapper/entrepreneur Jay-Z’s Roc Nation company and the NFL, announced on Aug. 13, underscores the deepening integration between sports and music as complementary entertainment propositions. And just as music venues have been adapting to accommodate changes in musical genres and styles, the new Jay-Z/NFL deal will have the same effect on football stadiums.

“Sound systems in sports venues have been becoming more hi-fi for music for a number of years, with an emphasis on speech intelligibility, but the recent ascendancy of hip-hop in pop music has changed everything,” says Paul Murdich, GM, TSI-Global, whose sports portfolio includes Busch Stadium. That’s manifest mainly, he says, in the form of additional subwoofers added to line-array systems.

A Danley Sound Labs BC412 subwoofer at the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium

Under the NFL’s agreement with Roc Nation, the management company will become the league’s “live music entertainment strategist.” Roc Nation and Jay-Z will consult on the league’s entertainment offerings, including the Super Bowl Halftime Show and the NFL Draft, and social-activism campaign, Inspire Change. Financial terms of the arrangement were not disclosed, but the Super Bowl alone generated more than $400 million in broadcast-ad revenue in recent years.

Murdich says that, although additional low-frequency energy is necessary for the types of music that are now part of every game, that same rumble is expected to be part of the sound and special effects used to punctuate high points of games, such as touchdowns and goals.

“It’s all about the boom at the bottom now,” he says. “You need that now to energize the crowds.”

Hip-Hop on Top
The pact with Jay-Z reflects the new dominance of hip-hop and rap music, which sits atop music-industry charts. Nearly a quarter of all tracks consumed in the U.S. in 2018 came from rap, according to data marketer BuzzAngle, even as consumption of rock tracks — live and broadcast sports’ long-time go-to genre — dropped to 11.7%. That means that stadium and arena sound systems have to be able to adequately reproduce hip-hop’s signature low end, just as they once had to adapt to rock’s higher decibel levels and strident, guitar-centric midrange.

“Hip-hop and rap have definitely affected sound-system design in stadiums,” confirms Justo Gutierrez, director, AV and sound, for systems integrator Diversified, which has put AV systems into the MLB Angels Stadium of Anaheim and the Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium. He notes how the genre’s emphasis on low frequencies requires more, and more robust, low-end reproduction capability: “Even five years ago, subwoofers in stadium systems were [considered] optional, if they were considered at all. Now we have clients requesting subs as part of the system.”

Gutierrez points out that additional subwoofers in a system come with a higher cost than conventional speakers. Subs are larger and require more power, which means more amplifiers. With distributed systems, most designs call for a larger quantity of subwoofers than line-array designs do, to provide full-frequency coverage of the venue. And, because subwoofers have to operate at high sound-pressure levels to maximize efficiency, they often have to deploy certain techniques to manage that energy, such as multiple-sub cardioid configurations, to achieve a useful effect without overpowering the entire sound system and venue. These also come with additional costs.

That was the case in the sound system that Diversified recently installed at the Philadelphia Eagles’ Lincoln Financial Field, using specialized cardioid subwoofers from Fulcrum Acoustic.

“This is where the music is going,” says Gutierrez, who just finished initial consultations with ATK Audiotek, the sound-system provider for the Super Bowl’s halftime concert events, for the 2020 Super Bowl at the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium, where, in 2017, Diversified installed a sound system comprising 186 E-V XLCi-127DVX weatherized line-array components. “I can’t imagine a new sound system without subs as part of the overall system.”

Although the 2020 Super Bowl’s headliner is still TBD, Jay-Z’s arrangement with the NFL has already produced its first result. “Songs of the Season” is a season-long initiative in which participating musicians will create and deliver a song that will be integrated into NFL promotions each month. The songs will debut during an in-game broadcast and will be simultaneously released to multiple digital streaming platforms worldwide. All proceeds from the songs will go toward Inspire Change. Meek Mill, Meghan Trainor, and Rapsody have been announced as the first Inspire Change advocates of the 2019-20 NFL season. They were scheduled to perform a free concert at the NFL Kickoff Experience presented by EA Sports Madden NFL ’20 in Chicago’s Grant Park on Thursday, Sept. 5.