The only backbone related code in that snippet is the .unbind() call and the .trigger call. This is needed because this is our wrapper around the media element; it is an event emitter. If you're going to make something emit custom events, you'll need code to emit them and clean them up when you're done.
One area where backbone is lacking is lifecycle management. You do sometimes have to unbind things in order to prevent leaks. Backbone is very minimal in this regard. At Rdio, we've built our own tools on top of Backbone to abstract lifecycle away from the developer as much as possible. That being said, that weakness isn't illustrated in the code example picked by the blog post.
One area where backbone is lacking is lifecycle management. You do sometimes have to unbind things in order to prevent leaks. Backbone is very minimal in this regard. At Rdio, we've built our own tools on top of Backbone to abstract lifecycle away from the developer as much as possible. That being said, that weakness isn't illustrated in the code example picked by the blog post.