Floor sections for the Student Committee on Popular Entertainment’s (SCOPE) fall concert, Playboy Carti, have sold out in the first week of sales at the University of New Hampshire (UNH).
More than half of the 5,000 tickets that were released for Oct. 26 concert at the Whittemore Center, were sold between $10 and $30, despite facing a small increase in price and first-day sale trouble at the Memorial Union Building (MUB), according to SCOPE Executive Director Brandon Rose.
“I think they [students] were only able to buy one ticket when they were supposed to be able to buy two extra ones,” Rose, a senior computer science major, said concerning students who initially complained about facing difficulties buying tickets. “I honestly don’t know what the reason for that was, we just got it sorted as fast as we could.”
To promote sales, SCOPE targets ads on Facebook and Instagram, and hangs up posters around the campus and surrounding towns. Two thousand tickets have yet to be sold and are available on mubtickets.com for the concert next week.
Playboi Carti, known off-stage as Jordan Terrell Carter, is a 23-year-old “mumble rapper” from Atlanta, released his initial mixtape in 2017, where it was quickly rated “Best New Music,” by Pitchfork, and gained two number one singles that reached the 20s on Billboard’s Top 100. “Magnolia” and “Wokeuplike,” together have around 500 million plays on Spotify alone.
Carter announced via his Instagram Wednesday that his new album, “Whole Lotta Red,” will be released in the next 48 hours – just in time for the SCOPE concert.
Carter was chosen as the fall concert after a brainstorming session that happened right after the last concert that SCOPE put on (Lil Baby), in the spring of 2019. The 27 members of the organization “word vomit” artists that come to mind, and ultimately, the performer chosen is based on pricing and how well it will sell on campus, not based on the genre (as many students believe).
In order to add more artists to that same bill, the main artist has to accept, which can alter how fast or how long the process of bringing the concert to UNH can take. The whole process, Rose said, can take around three months after contracts have been signed.
“We go towards rap a lot more often,” Rose said. “Artists are cheaper, and if we are trying to make a bill, it’s the most popular genre right now. That’s not saying that I just want rap, I want to do everything. Artists can be $30k one day and a month later 100k, just because they shot up in price.”
Besides pricing and preforming background checks on artists, which needs to be done in order for police to let artists preform on campus Rose said, there isn’t much criteria that goes into artists that SCOPE chooses.
“We don’t try to force a type of genre or person,” Rose said. “We have female artists pop up on the board all the time and when it comes to order of preference and going in after these artists, it just hasn’t worked out in the past few years.”
Rose is hoping to diversify the types of artists featured at SCOPE events, but he’s optimistic about Carter’s performance.
“I think Playboy Carti has been getting a lot of attention recently,” Rose said. “We do a survey after every show asking for names, usually a couple times, but he was tied with the top name. Everyone has an opinion, but I think the response was good.”
