What goes into planning Spring Concert?

by Emily Price

With the Spring Concert on the horizon, some of us may be wondering what really goes into the decision making process for the event. How does the Student Programming Board (SPB) choose from the thousands of artists and music groups out there? The Echo sat down with SPB member Ben Shapiro ’20 to learn about all of the hard work that goes into bringing good music to campus.

Shapiro is one of three members of “Concerts and Live Music” group that works for SPB. Having joined this year, Shapiro works alongside Ethan O’Dell ’19 and Renner Thomas ’19 to organize concerts on campus, ranging from smaller shows to the Fall and Spring Concerts. Shapiro talks about his experience since joining SPB, “this is my first year on SPB, so it was definitely a learning curve for me. The basic process is that we try to come up with a list of as many artists as possible that we would potentially want to come to Spring Concert.”

With that list, the group goes to a representative of an agency that helps them narrow down which groups are on tour and which groups are not available. Once they know who is actually available for the concert, they go through the list and eliminate groups that are no longer a viable option.

“If someone is on tour, we obviously can’t get them to come play at Colby. If someone is too expensive based on our budget — which is pretty small to be honest in terms of getting a musical artist — we won’t be able to get them to play here either,” explains Shapiro.

According to Shapiro, SPB as a whole has a budget and a section of that goes towards “Concerts and Live Music.” This budget is then split between a lot of the smaller shows that come to campus, as well as Fall and Spring Concert. This is why SPB has to charge students for tickets in the fall as it helps raise enough money for them to be able to do a spring show. If they tried to make both of the concerts free, they wouldn’t be able to afford anyone and no one would know anyone that was coming.

There’s a lot more to planning than just checking availability. “Because we have to book the artists far enough in advance while they’re trying to set up their touring schedule and everything, we have to guess how expensive each group will be even if they aren’t booked yet. If we look and see who has an album coming out that people already kind of know, we can afford them to bring them to campus before the album comes out,” says Shapiro. Apparently, groups are more expensive to bring to campus once they release a new album because other venues will want them to play, so they can charge a lot more money.

So how do they actually come to the final decision? “We, the members of the planning committee, usually try to send out feelers throughout the year to see if people would be excited about certain artists coming to campus. Sometimes play their music in the Spa to gauge student reactions and opinions. The Spa is really where we’ll get the most feedback. Besides that, we’ll play music to our friends and with other groups of students and ask what people think of them. Sometimes students will go up to workers at the info-desk and tell them that they really liked a song.”

Picking a band is one thing, but convincing that artist to make the trek up to Waterville can be a real challenge. “It’s great if the artist is already touring in Portland. We can usually convince them to come to Colby after their tour in Portland, and then continue on with their show. We also try to release who will be playing at Spring Concert early enough so students don’t buy concert tickets in Portland, then find out they will be playing for free up here,” Shapiro clarifies.

The final step in the decision making process is getting approval from the administration. Surprisingly enough, this doesn’t seem to be the biggest hurdle the SPB committee has to jump through. Shapiro explains, “it’s mostly to make sure that the artist as a person is a good person. They just need to check that the artist hasn’t ever done anything in their personal life that is unacceptable and would be offensive to bring to campus. As far as I know, they haven’t ever vetoed anyone. Our job is just to make sure we don’t pick someone that the administration will reject because then we have to re-start the entire process.”