Apple Music will become the title sponsor of the Super Bowl halftime show, taking over from PepsiCo Inc., which has had its name on the star-studded intermission program since 2013.

Apple Inc.’s sponsorship begins this season with Super Bowl LVII, which will be played in Arizona in February. The US$2.5 trillion tech company may have paid as much as US$50 million a year for the five-year deal, Sportico reported, without saying where it got the information.

The pricey sponsorship’s announcement also coincides with Apple’s bid for the rights to stream the NFL’s Sunday Night games. The company is considered the front-runner for the popular package of games, for which the league is seeking US$2.5 billion, an increase of US$1 billion over its current deal with DirecTV. 

Apple has generally stayed away from sponsorships, which are primarily a marketing tactic. Apple Music sponsored the German football club FC Bayern Munich for at least two years last decade. But the firm does have a long history with the Super Bowl: It’s been running ads during the event since 1984, when it first introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer.

PepsiCo announced in May it was ending its 10-year sponsorship run. The Super Bowl, the National Football League’s annual season-ending championship, is among the most-watched sporting events in the world. More than 120 million viewers watched the halftime show in 2022, with total US viewers increasing 6 per cent from the previous year.