and Apple Music have set the soundtrack for Monday Night Football this season, announcing a 2026-27 collaboration that will put Apple Music in charge of the music heard across promotions, live telecasts and Monday Night Countdown. The first track in the rollout is Lil Baby’s Dead Fresh, which will back ’s Week 1 push.
The timing matters because is opening its biggest NFL season yet with 28 games and Super Bowl LXI on Feb. 14, 2027, while also moving through what it has framed as its Year of the Super Bowl. Apple Music is stepping into a role had previously filled with individual artists, and this time the music will carry the network’s football coverage from Monday nights to the Apple Music Super Bowl halftime show.
For Week 1, that means Dead Fresh will run behind ’s promotional efforts for Monday, Sept. 14, at 8 p.m. ET, when the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs meet on. Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, Lisa Salters and Laura Rutledge are back to lead Monday Night Football, and Buck and Aikman are entering their record 25th season together as an NFL broadcast duo.
The partnership gives a single music source for the season, but it does not yet give viewers the full list of what comes next. Apple Music says its weekly picks will appear in the following games, which means the launch is complete even if the rollout is not. That leaves the rest of the season’s soundtrack still to be revealed, a gap that keeps the focus on how Apple Music will pace the music around Monday nights rather than on any one song alone.
said the move is meant to keep the energy of Monday Night Football moving with Apple Music’s curators and tastemakers, and the first selection shows the direction: a kickoff track built to match the moment. With Week 1 now set and the Road to Halftime countdown underway on Apple Music, the next question is less about whether the partnership will spread across the season than which songs will define it after Dead Fresh.
