Although many Ohio University students struggle to get to a 10 a.m. class, they were more-than willing to crawl out of bed Wednesday morning to snag one of the highly sought-after 3,600 available Wiz Khalifa tickets.
Tickets went on sale at 10 a.m. Wednesday morning, yet the winding queue started as early as 11 p.m. Tuesday. Students spent hours in line, some missing class, all with the hopes of acquiring one of the prized tickets.
“If we don’t get the $35 tickets, we are not going,” said Emma Jett, a sophomore studying nursing who began standing in line at 9:45 a.m. “They are going really fast.”
To mitigate the number of classes Jett and her friends missed Wednesday, they took turns standing in line, a tactic many others adopted to ensure tickets for the much-anticipated Spring Convo Concert May 18.
“Wiz is someone better than OU normally sees,” said Jared Azar, a junior studying philosophy, while standing in line. “It’s who we want to see.”
By 11:45 a.m., both floor and bleacher presale tickets were sold out. The line had hardly diminished though, with students waiting until the office closed at 5 p.m., at which time 2,350 of the 4,200 tickets available had been sold, said Andrew Holzaepfel, associate director of the Campus Involvement Center.
“It’s fantastic,” said Kent Smith, vice president for Student Affairs. “It exceeds our expectations.”
Wednesday’s ticket sales were exclusively presale student tickets; public ticket sales will begin Thursday, with about 1,850 tickets available.
Although a contract fee and opening act for the show have yet to be decided, Holzaepfel said the Campus Involvement Center was able to set ticket prices based on last year’s B.o.B ticket sales.
Holzaepfel added that the opening act should be decided within the next two months.
Although Holzaepfel expects Khalifa’s contract fee to be higher than B.o.B.’s last year, he said the Campus Involvement Center was confident enough that the show would sell enough tickets to allow them to drop the price of higher-end general-admission tickets from $55 to $45 and still cover the cost.
“From what I saw today, I would think that we will sell more tickets than last year,” Smith said. “It’s exciting to me because that means we gave the students what they asked for.”
wh092010@ohiou.edu
