The Student Union Board (SUB) announced Tuesday night that Friday’s fall concert will feature Quinn XCII as the main act, with Odessa as the opener. The event will be the first SUB concert since Hoodie Allen and Sammy Adams performed on campus in November of 2016.
Junior and lead programmer of concerts Bethany Boggess said the concert will be free for students this semester since it will take place in Legends.
“We were unable to use Stepan this semester because athletics is using it, so Legends was the perfect alternative,” she said in an email. “Since Legends is a smaller venue, it allows us to offer free admission for students, which isn’t something SUB is usually able to do.”
Legends will be an appropriate venue for Quinn XCII, Boggess said, because the nightclub has often hosted similar artists.
“Legends often has up-and-coming artists — they had artists like Twenty One Pilots, Echosmith and Sam Hunt before they blew up — and we think Quinn XCII will fit that bill,” she said.
Boggess said she hopes students who are unfamiliar with Quinn XCII and Odessa will take the chance to discover new artists.
“Though not everyone will know Quinn XCII and/or Odessa’s music, we hope students will know that we chose them for a reason and will give them a listen and decide to come to the show,” Boggess said. “Quinn XCII is currently featured on Spotify’s Pop Rising playlist; we think he’ll only get bigger from here.”
The process of choosing an artist for the SUB concert was a student-led effort, with Boggess and the concerts committee reaching out to agents and making offers, Madison McFarland, SUB co-director of programming, said.
“With this one, because we went through Legends, they actually have contacts for us, so we go straight through them and they connect us with agents,” McFarland said. “And then Bethany and the whole concerts committee worked to just start contacting agents, and we just go from there — see what our price range fits with and the artists that will work for that, and then we get our top five, and we narrow it down from there. We start sending out offers and then contracts following that. It’s a long process — a lot of times things fall through, so we work really hard to try to do it really far ahead of time, and luckily, it worked out this semester.”
During the spring 2017 semester, SUB decided to forego a concert because the concerts committee decided none of the artists available were worth the amount of money they were asking for, instead deciding to invest its budget elsewhere. Boggess said she was happy this year’s concerts committee was able to bring the event back with an artist about which the committee is excited.
“We’re really fortunate to have the ability to be flexible in SUB and to try new ideas that we think the student body will like,” she said. “That said, we are excited to bring a concert back — and one we think the student body will really enjoy. We’ve also already started the process of planning next semester’s concert. For us, it’s all about starting early and responding to potential setbacks as opportunities to take a different direction.”
McFarland said she is excited to be able to share the results of the committee’s hard work with the rest of the student body.
“It’s a big deal when we can finally sign someone,” she said. “I don’t think a lot of students understand that we go through a very long process to get to this point, so there is a lot of effort that’s put into it.”
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