OH MY! and ESPN College Football

[Miguel]

I'm thinking this is really pretty big news.

It's particularly cool that HTGR is now another song getting some exposure.

I think it is too. I haven't seen the spots yet, but it sounds like the songs can clearly be heard. I hope they're scheduled to run the entire season.

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ESPN Music: Landing A Song Can Be A Career Power Play
Exposure is a Career Boost to Musicians

May 29, 2011|By ERIC R. DANTON, edanton@courant.com

The emphasis on sports tends to obscure this fact, but ESPN is also a huge consumer of music.

In fact, music has grown into a crucial underpinning of the Bristol-based company's televised sports empire. It's the soundtrack to game coverage, highlight reels, news shows and more, and the cable network uses music-themed contests, full-album streams, promotions and live chats with artists to attract viewers to its website.

"Music is in everything we do," says Claude Mitchell, the company's coordinating director of music.. "You can't watch a show on ESPN without hearing a piece of music."

With such a large and continual appetite for music, ESPN has increasingly become an alternate way for bands to reach fans in an era of declining record sales and narrowing radio playlists. Landing a song on ESPN can have a real impact, musicians say, a claim backed by sales figures.

There are plenty of opportunities for exposure. Although the cable giant commissions some original music for theme songs, ESPN pays to license about 70 percent of the music it uses, a process overseen by Mitchell, music director Kevin Wilson and a team of 10 subordinates at the company's Bristol campus.

ESPN has struck recent deals with the Beastie Boys and Foo Fighters to use music from each group's new album across its programming platforms, and songs by rap-metal band Hollywood Undead, emo band 30 Seconds to Mars, Grammy-winning country-pop act Lady Antebellum and English indie-folk group Mumford & Sons have been featured on ESPN shows in May.

"We've done those band deals with just about everybody, from rock to hip-hop to country, with male vocals and with female vocals," Wilson says during a recent interview in his office, where the walls are festooned with music memorabilia, including guitars and gold records.

The company also is soliciting versions of the "Baseball Tonight" theme song from a range of bands, and has received entries from Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Staind and jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli (who gort a career boost singing the Foxwoods theme "The Wonder of it All"), which are posted online at http://www.espn.com/music.

ESPN began paying closer attention to the music it used not long after Wilson went to work there in 1994. The network launched the X Games the next summer, and he helped link the brand to music that would attract the attention of extreme-sports enthusiasts, namely, young people, who were also often fans of alternative rock and skate-punk.

"We were able to try some things over there that turned out be successful," Wilson says.

Since then, the music department has expanded and, particularly over the past 10 years, taken a more active role in working with the people producing ESPN's shows to find good musical fits. That period happens to coincide with the record industry's steady downhill slide, which has proven a boon for ESPN.

"As the industry has evolved and outlets have changed for getting music to fans, that's helped us," Mitchell says. "Ten years ago, we wouldn't have been able to do these kinds of deals."

ESPN's more deliberate use of music has benefited bands, too, including acts like 3 Doors Down. The Mississippi hard-rockers have worked with ESPN since releasing their first album in 2000.

"It's a great opportunity," says Matt Roberts, the band's guitarist. "It's another forum, to be on ESPN, to have the sports crowd. It's turned out really, really good for us, because early on, we got the whole NASCAR affiliation, and that still works today."

Bands get paid when ESPN licenses their music, though it is difficult to categorize how much. "We're able to do stuff for free, or for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It just depends," Mitchell says.

It's easier to measure the benefits that come from exposure. An established artist can see a sales spike of anywhere between 10 to 50 percent after landing a song on an ESPN show, and the jump can reach triple digits for lesser-known acts, says Dave Bakula, senior vice president of analytics entertainment for the Nielsen Company, which measures TV ratings and monitors music sales.

"Any time you see something get exposed for the first time, even if it's just a few seconds, a lead-in to a particular show, you see an impact immediately in sales," Bakula says. "ESPN is not out there trying to break new artists, but when you know who your viewer is, you're able to say, here is the demographic that is watching this particular show at this particular time, here is the perfect music to go with that."

Wilson credits their success in part to the fact that he and Mitchell didn't have television backgrounds when they started at ESPN.

"Me and Claude are music guys who learned the TV world, which is a benefit," Wilson says, because they weren't wedded to an established way of doing things. Their goal, Wilson says, was figuring out, "How can we fit ESPN into what's going on out there?"

Wilson, 42, a Bristol native with glasses, a neatly cropped Mohawk and arms sleeved up with tattoos, studied sound engineering at the University of New Haven and the music business at the University of Miami before moving back to Bristol, where he was working at a deli while considering his next step. During a catering gig at ESPN, Wilson took note of an executive's name, sent him a resume and, a few months later, landed a job.

The more buttoned-down Mitchell, 46, grew up in Staten Island and studied aerospace engineering and economics at Syracuse University, though music was an early obsession.

"I was the kid who lived at the record store all the time," he says.

Mitchell worked in music publishing for 10 years, jumped to MP3.com during the '90s tech boom and, through a friend, heard of a vacancy at ESPN.

Each listens to as much music as possible, spanning a range of styles and sounds. Wilson, for example, has a particular fondness for lyrics that could fit sports-related situations.

"I'm a fan of all music," Wilson says. "Even if you're not a fan of all music, in our position, you have to figure it out."

Converting a passion for music into a job, even a dream job, has drawbacks: Mitchell and Wilson say they're constantly sizing up music they hear at work, at home, in restaurants, at the movies, wherever, for how well it would work in the context of ESPN.

"It's like having your favorite food and eating it three meals a day for years and years," Mitchell says. "It just becomes normal sustenance. It doesn't dampen the passion, but you listen differently."


http://articles.courant.com/2011-05-29/b...emorabilia

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2007 video interview with Claude: http://www.mixonline.com/ai/video/rhnyc0..._mitchell/

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2009:

Wilson said choosing songs to be featured on the various outlets “depends on the parameters and budgets” labels are willing to work with. He noted labels and artists are “usually pushing the (latest) single, and many times we work that in, but we’re also looking for songs that lyrically go with our content.” Mitchell said of the relationship with labels, “There’s definitely a push to expose their artists. The trend has been that we’ve been working with them on these newer releases in the same way Springsteen is rolling out (his new CD) in the same time period that we’re featuring his music. … That’s where we can help bring value to the artists and the label to expose them to the ESPN fan base and help build awareness for them.” Compensation between ESPN and the publishers and labels is dependent on each agreement, but Mitchell said, “We don’t get those great deals anymore.”

LIVING IN THE FUTURE: Wilson said he hoped the use of high-profile musical acts in programming “continues to grow the way it has been the last couple of years.” “It’s something that we’re pretty aggressive at thinking about and conceptualizing and bringing to our productions,” he said. Mitchell noted ESPN is always looking to use recognizable music to enhance production value. But he warned, “We’re not going to do a deal just to do a deal. We want the right artist and the right music to complement both the band and our productions.”[

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Daily...ntent.aspx