Beats and Basketball: The Miraculous March Madness Music Festival You Can Attend For Free
More than any other sport in the U.S., basketball is a multimedia entertainment experience. Football hunks and baseball sluggers might be at the top of their game, but rarely do they have the cultural cache of basketball players. Basketball players are the coolest.
The NBA has seen major success by aligning itself with fashion and pop culture, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association has followed suit when hyping up March Madness college basketball match-ups. Alongside their Final Four games, the NCAA organizes a March Madness Musical Festival that’s free to the public thanks to corporate sponsors and has attracted an impressive array of headliners, from Rihanna to Tim McGraw to Pitbull.
2024’s lineup includes ZEDD, Jonas Brothers, Mumford & Sons and The Black Keys as part of the festival in Phoenix April 5-7.
If you’ve felt inspired by any of the amazing artists who have performed for March Madness fans, Universal Production Music has a library of diverse tracks available for licensing for film and media projects. Learn more about our flexible licensing solutions.
Expect Creative Genre Mixing
March Madness Musical Festival lineups over the years have offered a true sampling of American music, heavily featuring home-grown genres like hip-hop and country.
A music event on this scale isn’t the norm for all cities that host the Final Four, and the fact that it’s free makes it even better. Local flavor influences the scene, too – jazz musicians helped liven up events for 2022’s host city, New Orleans.
Here are some recent trends and highlights from the March Madness Music Festival to get the creative juices flowing before you register to find your next sound.
Hip Hop Nation
Hip hop and basketball have gone together like peanut butter and jelly since the genre first went mainstream. The first hip hop Billboard Hot 100 hit in 1979 name-dropped The Knicks, and the University of Michigan’s 1991 Fab Five cemented hip hop culture on the court in baggy shorts and black shoes and socks.
“Most basketball players want to be entertainers, and most entertainers want to be athletes. So we pay attention to each other,” Fab Five member Jimmy King told the Associated Press. “I think we use the hip-hop genre of music to hype us up for games, keep our spirits up and motivated.”
Hip hop artists are often featured at the March Madness Music festival, but 2023’s festival was particularly special as Houston native Megan Thee Stallion performed for her hometown.
Kendrick Lamar also performed in Houston in 2016, causing the festival to max out capacity hours before he went onstage.
If you’re making media about basketball, leaving out hip hop would be like leaving out the hoops. Check out UPM’s selection of hip hop tracks for your next basketball production.
Country and Blues Roots
While people might not associate a country twang as much with basketball as they do an urban beat, 2023 superstars Tim McGraw and Keith Urban were only the most recent in a long string of strong country acts featured at the March Madness Music Festival. The event has also hosted Jason Aldean, Kenny Chesney, and the Zac Brown Band.
Love it or loathe it, a big, swinging country number to raise a beer to is the perfect way to get any sports crowd going.
Country’s cousin, rock n’ roll, is also a prominent feature of any March Madness celebration. The NCAA festival stage has played host to Arcade Fire and the Black Keys, both bands credited in part for a revitalization of the genre in the 2010s. American rock legends like Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band have also dazzled lucky audiences during Final Four weekends past.
With its individualistic confidence, rock is the perfect complement to the personality-forward sport of basketball. Shuffle through Universal Production Music’s picks for top rock tracks for your basketball highlight reel to get in the zone.
The Youth Vote
Even though college basketball fans come from all walks of life, the Final Four is, at the end of the day, a college event. Past lineups of the March Madness Music Festival have been relatively youthful and culturally boundary-pushing. Gen Z queer icon Lil Nas X was a huge draw in 2023, and non-binary indie darling King Princess played her first show in New Orleans at the 2022 festival. The Kid Laroi represented the youthful emo rap genre in 2022 as well.
The pressure to keep on the cutting edge of culture can feel difficult, but Universal Production Music’s tracks are curated with changing times in mind. Discover our catalog of production syncs to see how we’ve supported past projects, and get inspired with tracks for basketball events.