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| Ben Folds on campus=sold out crowds. Duh! (Wabash College) |
SPEC has sold up to 3000 tickets for the Ben Folds/Third Eye Blind fling concert so far this year. The first 500 sold for $20 a pop and the remaining tickets went for $25 A certain number of tickets were held back for the day of the gig at $30. Let’s assume — I’m being generous to SPEC here — that they kept 500 to sell on the last day (although rumor has it only 2400 have been sold thus far so there’s a little hope for us all). The above ticket pricings bring about a total revenue of $75000.
Not bad. Or so you’d think.
In fact, SPEC massively underestimated the potential draw of a Ben Folds/Third Eye Blind lineup. By doing so, and by not having any kind of contingency plan, they are missing out on potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wracked with fear by the failure of past years (although you’d think any sensible student would be able to tell the difference in pull power between Sonic Youth and Ben Folds), SPEC booked Wynn Common which can only hold 3000 people and, which is essentially a glorified concrete rectangle.
The demand for tickets is still huge. Groups of Penn kids stood all day at the SPEC spot on the Walk, hoping that someone would trundle by and say “hey, you know what, the concert’s not sold out after all, who wants tickets?” But for all their hope, it wasn’t to be. The gig was gone. Tickets sold quicker than Britney’s hair on eBay. SPEC screwed up big time.
Considering the significant demand and the speed with which the tickets sold out, it’s well within the realm of possibility that SPEC could have sold 5000+ tickets. That’s an extra $50000 SPEC could have earned. And with increased demand and burgeoning exclusivity comes the momentum factor–soon everyone would’ve wanted tickets, who’d want to miss out on the gig of the century after all? There’s no telling how many students would have ended up buying tickets.
Franklin Field was the obvious choice for this gig. SPEC should have booked both Franklin Field and Wynn Court and then chosen the venue based on ticket sales. The women’s Lacross team plays on Saturday at noon but that’s the only potential sporting clash. And I doubt they’ll have 100 let alone 5000 turning up to watch them play. This concert should take priority. What happened to the good old days of Wyclef?
SPEC has missed the money boat big time. At least $50000, and possibly over $100000, of extra revenue was potentially available from this concert, money that could’ve been spent on improving the Spring Fling 2007 experience for us all, bringing more A-List speakers to Penn, and hiring an even more prestigious act to play at Spring Fling next year.
But the committee got it wrong. And we all poorer for it.
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April 8th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Shhhhhh… you’re making too much sense.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
This post seems to make sense, but in reality, SPEC did all they could. Hill Field was not made available to SPEC as an option, and to hold the concert in Franklin Field would have been so costly that the concert would have to have been opened to the public, which is not in keeping with Spring Fling tradition and would have required even more additional security and more money. You want a more prestigious act at Fling next year? Rally the higher ups to give SPEC a bigger budget for the concert. Besides all this, according to certain SPEC officials, Franklin Field was not available as an option anyway. People complained so much, but had you taken the 2.5 minutes to read the open letter from SPEC with regard to this, you would have a greater understanding of the issue at hand.