Sean Kingston, Bryce Vine to perform at on-campus concert in April

Sean Kingston and Bryce Vine will perform at the spring concert hosted by SpiderBoard at 7 p.m. on April 5 in the Robins Center. 

The identity of the performers was revealed at a concert reveal party on Feb. 28 in the Current, hosted by SpiderBoard. 

The well-attended reveal party featured a mac and cheese bar, temporary tattoos, a raffle, customized spring concert swag, a set from DJ Dollaz 804 and more. 

Students cheered after a short video played to announce the performers. The video included drone shots of the University of Richmond and text hyping up an eager crowd. It also featured selfie videos of Kingston and Vine expressing their excitement about coming to campus. 

“I can’t believe Sean Kingston is coming!” first-year student and reveal party attendee Annie Waters said. 

“I’m super excited,” junior and SpiderBoard member Bella Brown said. “We worked really hard on this event and it’s just really nice to see everybody turn out for the reveal, so I’m really excited for the concert itself.”

SpiderBoard executed an advertising campaign for the reveal party, including a car parked on the University Forum draped in a sheet painted with the date and time of the party and posters hung around campus and dorms. In the Tyler Haynes Commons, SpiderBoard members also crossed names off a list of 100 possible performers as the hours leading up to the reveal ticked down. 

Sophomore and SpiderBoard president Colin Sparkevicius planned the concert with sophomore and concert chair Erin Watton, among other members.

“We decided to do the reveal party too because last year people just kind of stood on tables and it didn’t have that effect of being like ‘this is an awesome, exclusive event that Richmond gets to have,’” Watton said. 

The choice to host a reveal party was born out of a desire to kickstart ticket sales and further the excitement, Sparkevicius said. 

Secrecy was key in maintaining that buzz. Sparkevicius said that the other SpiderBoard members had not known the identities of the performers before the reveal. Only the concert committee knew the performers’ identities. 

Involving students was key to Sparkevicius in selecting a performer from the get go. SpiderBoard sent out two surveys to the student body in fall of 2018. One focused on genre and the other asked students to select from a list of possible performers. 

“We wanted to gauge students' responses and to see effectively how many students we could get to come to the concert,” Sparkevicius said. “Just reach out to them with some artists and see where their interests lie.” 

The choice to involve students seemed especially important in the wake of last year’s homecoming concert when The All-American Rejects performed at The National. The venue, date and time for that concert were changed days before the band was planned to perform, causing frustration for many students.  

“That was a complete bust and they lost a lot of money on that,” Watton said.  

Sparkevicius and Watton both expressed their hope for a more successful concert this year. 

“To have it as successful as possible, we’ve been putting in so much work -- the five of us on the concert committee and our adviser, we’ve really been working hard,” Sparkevicius said. 

SpiderBoard is offering tickets to students beginning Feb. 28. An allotment of tickets is also open to Virginia Commonwealth University students and also nearby schools without the university’s budget, Watton said. The concert is also open to the general public. Tickets offered to UR students will be cheaper than those offered to non-students. 

SpiderBoard plans to give UR students exclusive access to the floor level of the concert, whereas all others will be restricted to seated rows in the Robins Center, Watton said. 

Tickets are $20 for UR students and are available for purchase now.

Contact contributor Isabel Meyer at isabel.meyer@richmond.edu.