Students’ choice of acts for the potential spring 2014 concert involve some big-name bands.
Students recently completed a survey asking them to vote for their top five artist choices. The survey, which was delivered via students’ email accounts, was open for two weeks.
The list of potential artists consisted of Asher Roth, Mike Stud, We the Kings, Breathe Carolina, The Cab, Jana Kramer, Jessie James, The Maine, Cartel and The Ready Set.
Patrick McKamy, Coordinator of Student Activities, explained the artists were chosen according to budget and what the student committee believed students would enjoy.
“Originally what we did was we had a list of everyone who was remotely eligible through budget,” said McKamy.
The student committee narrowed down the original list of 50 or 60 bands through different levels of voting and discussion.
“We had a discussion as far as trying to make sure that we had a good balance between the three different genres, country, rap and alternative rock,” McKamy said. “We were able to get a pretty good balance, and the students were very cautious that they wanted a balance for the general student body to vote on.”
McKamy said he is pleased with the voting process.
“We had over 680 votes,” said McKamy. “It’s actually higher than what we get for some other elections, so we were very happy with how it came out.”
Student Activities is tentatively moving forward with the concert, said McKamy.
“We have contacted a middle agent who is the person who goes out and contacts the actual artists we are looking at,” McKamy said.
After this process, the school must ensure it can provide for artists’ concert requirements.
“From there we can actually put forth a bid. If the band agrees to the bid, then we can move forward. If the bid counters, we can accept that or we can do another counter-bid and see what they go for,” said McKamy.
The process of obtaining an artist can be complicated, he said.
“It can be a very easy process or it can be a give and take process,” said McKamy.
“Overall we’re still optimistic about the prospect of having a spring concert and we’d really like to see this happen,” said McKamy. “We think it’s possible, we hope that the students can really enjoy it and get that concert experience that they’ve been looking for, for so long.”
Caitlin Vitale, junior Speech-Language Pathology student and Student Government Association coordinator, said the concert is generating student interest.
“We got a lot of return votes and we were just very happy with the student response from it,” said Vitale. “We didn’t have any problems with the survey. We were able to get the votes so it went really well.”
Vitale said plans will begin to come together in January or February.
“Right now we’re just trying to nail down the act, so that helps us nail down the date,” said Vitale. “Then we should have that set up by next semester and then the committee will be meeting again to talk about the specifics.”