Months of anticipation will come to an end Friday night when Pittsburgh’s own Wiz Khalifa takes the stage for the Spring Convo Concert.
Khalifa with featured guest Sean Kingston will perform at The Convo before a packed crowd that is expected to sell out before the night is over.
Andrew Holzaepfel, associate director for the Campus Involvement Center, said 4,750 tickets have already been sold with only 250 remaining in the upper obstructed view seats, Last year’s B.o.B. show sold 2,000 fewer tickets compared with this year’s show.
“We were thrilled with B.o.B last year, but we wanted to be bigger and better,” said Kyle Triplett, president of Student Senate. “Wiz is a bigger act, and we got a bigger response as far as ticket sales go.”
Triplett said he hopes Student Senate will continue the model that was put forth this year in which students vote on the act they would want to see, adding that he believes the voting model is why there is an increase in ticket sales.
Even with the increased ticket sales, the university will not be able to pay the $150,000 cost for Friday night’s show from those sales alone. To cover the gap, an estimated $10,000 will be taken out of the General Fee, which is taken from tuition paid to the university by students.
In the fall, that General Fee money was set aside as a cushion for the concert.
Triplett said he does not expect to have to use the entire safety-net fund.
Part of the reason so many tickets have been sold is that people are coming from out of town to see all of the weekend’s events, including the eighth annual Nelsonville Music Festival and 9Fest, said Hannah Croft, live entertainment director and PR coordinator for the Campus Involvement Center. Still, she said, the event is directed at the students.
“The reason we do big concerts like this is so that people from Athens don’t have to go to Columbus,” Croft said. “These kind of shows are (in Columbus) all the time, and they are pricier because they have a whole metropolitan area to play off of.”
She added that this is probably the biggest music weekend at OU simply because there is something to offer everyone on every day.
“I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about it,” Triplett said of Friday’s show. “There will be 5,000 students in The Convo all at once for the same reason, and I think it’s going to be a great environment.”
wh092010@ohiou.edu
