You would think that a large company like the NFL, worth BILLIONS, would be willing to shell out some of that profitable money for their halftime show. But they don’t. They pay for the production value of the show, which can be quite extensive, so there’s something to mention there, but they definitely don’t pay the performers directly.

SO now we witness the true power of what the entity of the Super Bowl is. Despite not paying the performers directly, many performers have increased album shares and sales of at minimum 434%. That minimum within the past 5 years was the band Maroon 5, which performed at the 2019 Super Bowl. (found here)

Let’s run some numbers here, just for the sake of numbers. An ad this year in the Super Bowl costs $6.5-7 Million to run. NBC has about 80-90 slots, giving it a cool $550 Million dollar windfall from the commercials. Each year, Fox, NBC and CBS pay the NFL $1Billion dollars each for their game rights and the Super Bowl varies between the 3. Which means NBC just made half it’s nut on the big game dance advertising for the year. It won’t take much to really generate the rest on the 90 games they’re broadcasting during the year as well. But let’s also not forget that the Super Bowl itself is watched by about 1 in 3 people in America alone, which grants it enormous viewing power.

Let’s go back to Maroon 5 again. In 2019, they hadn’t released an album since 2014. And yet, their catalog had massive staying power, generating them the 2nd spot, behind Eminem’s catalog of hits on streaming and online sales. “Each month the global market is lower than the previous one, but even in late 2019 they still sell much more than others as Memories is already at 310,000 units.” Assuming that that Super Bowl spike is correct, that would account for that 310k units being bumped easily to 1.4 Million sales, and a nice heavy spike in merchandising sales as well. If you take the average of sales to be $1.00, and minus any other issues, that’s still a nice split for the band members for just PLAYING a shortened version of their show. I’m sure it also doesn’t account for any effects afterwards-like more sponsorship deals or anything else that may be tied to the popularity of the Super Bowl.

Even this morning I was loading up 2001’s “The Next Episode” just because it was banging last night. It still slaps. And Dre is gonna make a whole lot of money off those sales.

And just for nerdiness’ sake, if you take the other sponsors like Fox and CBS, you’ll also realize that they have bills to pay too. There are 272 NFL games during the season. Split those between the top 3 companies and that means that each broadcaster gets 90 games. Divide that by the 1 Billion that they need to pay for the rights, and the 80 commercial slots per game (probably high but close), that means that the networks need to sell an average or regular game ad for a mere 140K in order to be in the black. I’m sure that they sell the ads for double to triple that due to overhead and ACTUAL profit. But based on those numbers alone, it’s quite a nice racket, if you can get it. Even better if you’re the NFL and everybody pays you for nothing.

EDIT: Here’s a price estimate from 2019 saying advertisers paid 400k per ad during a regular season game. There ya go….