Why Inspirational Music Has Become Part of the Big-Event Experience

Have you noticed the inspirational music trend recently? Whether you’re scrolling on TikTok or you’re at a sporting event, music that gets you hype is part of the experience.

Music has a big role at big events, and there is evidence to back this up. It improves the overall experience, evokes all the right emotions (based on the music playing), and makes everything feel more important. Major events have understood this for a long time. Music helps tell the audience when to become excited or when to become emotional. It’s not like they don’t know how to control their emotions, but music guides them through the experience.

And inspirational music plays a really important part in the big-event experience, especially when we talk about sports.

So, how did we end up here? Let’s find out.

Music Tells Your Brain That Something Important Is About to Happen

Before digging deeper and explaining how inspirational music works in big events, the best way is to start with an example. Let’s take the UEFA Champions League anthem, which is one of the most inspirational sounds you can hear in sports that still gives fans the chills.

The competition could simply send the teams onto the pitch and begin the match. Instead, the players line up while a choir and orchestra perform music written to sound ceremonial and enormous.

Composer Tony Britten created the anthem in 1992, drawing inspiration from Handel’s Zadok the Priest. The original recording involved the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chorus.

And none of this was accidental. Handel’s piece was written for the coronation of King George II in 1727. So, they’ve attached this anthem to the same musical language, which gives a football match a sense of ceremony.

It sparks emotions, it carries history, it makes every match feel more important, and fans are more excited when they hear it.

Horse Racing Has Its Own Version of the Same Trick

Horse racing is another example where music has the power to transfer emotions and history. After all, this is one of the few sports where race meetings are built around ritual.

If you follow big races, you know that “My Old Kentucky Home” is basically the official anthem of the Kentucky Derby. Churchill Downs traces the tradition back more than a century. And evidence suggests that song was already part of the Derby Day by 1921. The University of Louisville Marching Band has performed it at nearly every Derby since 1936.

The song carries a complicated historical legacy tied to Stephen Foster, slavery, and nineteenth-century America. It isn’t really an inspiration song when you hear the lyrics, but the Kentucky Derby made it into one.

We can spot the same pattern in other horse racing events like the Breeders’ Cup, where they’ve built an entire campaign around the classic song “The Best Is Yet to Come” made by legends such as Tony Bennett, Michael Bublé, and Frank Sinatra. And it makes the experience much better, especially if you’re at home looking to place a bet on the 2026 Breeders’ Cup online. It will get you in the right mood.

Inspirational Music Changes the Athlete Too

The effect is not limited to spectators.

Sports psychologists have spent years studying music before and during exercise, and the findings explain why changing rooms, warm-up areas, and headphones are full of it.

A 2023 systematic review of controlled studies found consistent evidence that pre-exercise music can increase motivation and arousal, with several studies also showing improvements in measures such as speed or power when athletes listened to preferred motivational music before performing.

That does not mean playing “Eye of the Tiger” automatically removes five seconds from your marathon time.

Unfortunately. But music can help athletes reach the emotional state they want before competition.

A Crowd Singing Together Stops Being Thousands of Separate People

The effect becomes even more interesting when the audience joins in.

Liverpool’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” began as a song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. Gerry and the Pacemakers released their famous version in 1963; it became a hit in Liverpool, and supporters at Anfield continued singing it even after it disappeared from the pre-match record rotation. It has since become inseparable from Liverpool FC.

The song works because nobody is merely listening.

Thousands of people participate.

Research into collective singing helps explain why that feels so powerful. Studies have found that singing together can increase feelings of social closeness and connection even among people who did not previously know one another. Research specifically examining sporting soundscapes also links collective chanting and singing with expressions of shared supporter identity.

For a few minutes, people from completely different lives become one extremely loud organism.

This is excellent until the referee makes a controversial decision. Then the organism becomes less inspirational.

The Olympics Understood the Power of Music From the Beginning

Music has been built into the modern Olympics almost from Day One.

The Olympic Anthem was composed by Spyros Samaras with words by Kostis Palamas for the first modern Games in Athens in 1896. The International Olympic Committee eventually adopted it officially in 1958, and it has been used at every Summer and Winter Olympics since 1960.

Opening and closing ceremonies then expanded the musical idea enormously.

Host cities use orchestras, popular artists, choirs, and culturally significant songs to introduce themselves to the world. The recent Milano Cortina 2026 opening ceremony, for example, assembled performers including Andrea Bocelli, Laura Pausini, Mariah Carey, and Lang Lang as part of a ceremony built around Italian identity and the theme of harmony.

So, there is no doubt that music plays a big role in big events, and it looks like inspirational music is taking over the world.