Illustration by Alycea Tinoyan; Naomi Baker/Getty Images; Tomas Cuesta/Getty Images; Armando Gallo/Getty Images

It was May 1977, and Queen had simply completed its encore at Bingley Hall within the English city of Stafford when the group, fairly than dispersing and heading dwelling, started to sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Originally featured within the 1945 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Carousel, Gerry & The Pacemakers had popularized the tune with their 1963 model, and shortly after, it turned an anthem of the British soccer membership Liverpool FC. The spontaneous incident at Bingley Hall would endlessly change the cultural panorama: It impressed singer Freddie Mercury and guitarist Brian May to jot down two of Queen’s most iconic songs.

“The story we’ve been told is that Brian and Freddie said, ‘Why don’t we write our own anthems?’ ” says Dominic Griffin, vp of licensing at Disney Music Group, which owns the North American rights to Queen’s music. “So Brian wrote ‘We Will Rock You,’ Freddie wrote ‘We Are the Champions,’ and they started finishing their shows with those. I’m not sure if there was one particular moment, but the band began to realize that there was not much difference between the crowd at a rock show and the crowd at a football game. It was having the same reaction.”

Whether as a result of its stomp-clap beat, call-to-action lyrics or easy melody — or extra seemingly a mix of all three — “We Will Rock You” specifically turned probably the most well known songs in historical past, particularly at sporting occasions, the place it blares nightly in arenas and stadiums world wide. According to BMI, “We Will Rock You” is the music within the performing rights group’s 22 million-plus-track repertoire most performed at NHL, NFL and MLB video games. It amassed over 9.5 million U.S. radio and TV characteristic performances from its 1977 launch by the third quarter of 2023.

That’s no accident. Since buying Queen’s catalog in 1990, each Disney and the band have inspired radio stations to make use of “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” in promos, allowed sports stadiums and groups to make use of them to soundtrack highlights and hype movies (which require extra approval, separate from the blanket public efficiency license that every one venues want to easily play a music in a public area) and licensed them to now-classic sports activities movies like The Mighty Ducks, Any Given Sunday and The Replacements. The label’s analysis information, together with figures from Radio Disney, confirmed that every one generations reacted to the songs.

“I think it was a way for sports teams to play something that appeals to everyone in the venue,” Griffin says. “Those Queen songs tick all the boxes because the lyric is great for sporting events and they’re just natural anthems, and the band went out to write an anthem for an arena that turned into a sports anthem.”

In the a long time since, an elite set of songs like these has grow to be a style unto itself, so often known as sports activities anthems that they’re nearly divorced from the unique context during which they had been launched — name it “the Jock Jams effect,” after the compilation albums from the mid-’90s that featured hype-up tracks like House of Pain’s “Jump Around” and Tag Team’s “Whoomp! (There It Is).” But extra trendy songs have additionally joined the pantheon lately, like The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What,” that are near-omnipresent at present sports activities video games.

“It becomes folk music when things like that happen,” Jack White stated of “Seven Nation Army” on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast in 2022. “It just becomes ubiquitous. I’m sure many people who are chanting the melody have no idea what the song is or where it came from or why, or whatever — it doesn’t matter anymore, and that’s just amazing.”

“We’ve been fortunate that several of Lil Jon’s songs have become incredible stadium anthems over the years,” says the artist’s supervisor, Rob Mac. “With ‘Turn Down for What,’ we knew that record felt massive, but the video really helped to boost the song as well. His music has always hyped up fans and crowds — his voice and energy [lend themselves] to that, and people really embrace and connect with it. His music became part of the experience inside a stadium.”

Still, loads of components should align — not simply the basics of what makes a music interesting to the lots, but in addition laborious work behind the scenes and somewhat luck — for a music to take off in a sports activities setting. Labels are continually pitching not simply legacy artists, however new acts and songs to native groups and TV networks hoping for a placement. If a music makes the lower, it may be an enormous increase for an artist.

“We spend a lot of time trying to get our new artists played inside sporting arenas because you’re reaching anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 people at a time and you’ve got a captive audience who can’t turn the radio off,” says Griffin, noting the success Disney has had with acts like Demi Lovato, nearly monday and Grace Potter, whose “The Lion, the Beast, the Beat” soundtracked a number of promos for the Detroit Lions throughout this 12 months’s NFL playoffs. “Any time you can get your music in front of that many thousands of people, it certainly helps with recognition.”

Take “Swag Surfin’ ” by Fast Life Yungstaz, for one excessive instance: The music has been a staple on the Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium for a number of years now, performed when the protection wants a giant cease or the group wants an power increase. In the weeks main as much as the NFL playoffs, the music averaged between 350,000 and 400,000 on-demand streams per week; that quantity jumped to over 1 million the week the Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins within the playoffs, when Taylor Swift was seen doing the music’s signature dance alongside Chiefs followers.

“In the arena business, when you’ve got 20,000 or 40,000 people and you’re trying to get them to do something, sometimes it’s the big, dumb gesture that really wins the day. Whether it’s some goofy guy dancing on the scoreboard or something that’s telling you to get up and yell, or a song that’s got a simple melody where everybody can participate, that really seems to be the most effective,” says Ray Castoldi, who has been Madison Square Garden’s music director/organist since 1989; in his position, he additionally continuously selects the music for New York Knicks and New York Rangers video games and infrequently performs the organ for the New York Mets at Citi Field.

Castoldi says he’s continually on the lookout for new songs so as to add to his sport playlist and that he recurrently assessments out new materials within the Garden — however that the rotation stays fairly regular, with round 300 songs on faucet for any given sport. “Arena standards are songs that appeal on such a wide basis that you almost can’t help yourself — it’s something in human nature where it motivates a large group of people,” he says. “I always see the equation as: You play the music for this huge assemblage of people and you want to get them all riled up and get their energy going, and then they give that energy to the players.”

And as soon as a music reaches that threshold, it achieves a brand new, nearly mythic standing that may lengthy outshine the remainder of an artist’s oeuvre. House of Pain racked up 87 million on-demand U.S. streams in 2023, in response to Luminate; 75 million of these had been for “Jump Around.” Even for an act as beloved and well-liked as Queen, which tallied 1.3 billion streams in 2023, 8% of its streams had been “We Will Rock You.” As Brian May stated in 2017 — in an interview after Billboard named that music the No. 1 jock jam of all time — “They’re beyond hits. We don’t have to sell them in any way.”

This story will appear in the Feb. 10, 2024, issue of Billboard.