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Why we can't afford big bands on campus
By Anne Proctor '07
STAFF WRITER

During our time here at Sweet Briar, I am sure that we have all attended some sort of CEO (Campus Events Organization) event. We may not even have known that CEO was behind our entertainment for that day. CEO provides a large variety of events here on campus at a very low cost to us. However, I have still heard many students complaining about the events and wishing we had more mainstream bands come to campus.

In an interview with James McGhee and the CEO staff, I discovered some very useful information about the CEO budget and entertainment costs. This year CEO is receiving $55,000 from SGA, $5,000 of which must go to SWEBOP. That leaves CEO with $50,000 to spend on all campus events for the entire year. They allocate 73% of that budget to their committee for bands. To some this may seem like plenty of money for a mainstream band, but this is sadly not the case. The contract costs for most mainstream bands are way beyond our budget, not to mention that that price does not even include production costs. For example, according to Renee Modzelewski, CEO president, the contract price for John Mayer is $75,000, OAR costs $75,000, Jason Mraz is a lowly $50,000, and 50 cent comes in at a whopping $100,000 plus.

The point is that with our current student life fee our school and CEO can afford none of these bands. Most other colleges and universities have a much larger budget to work with. James McGhee quoted that Hampden-Sydney College has $95,000, Lynchburg College has $110,000, Hollins has $105,000, and Longwood has $150,000. When these figures are compared to Sweet Briar's $50,000 budget, it is easy to see why we have smaller, less well-known bands play here. To be able to afford mainstream bands here on campus, every student's Student Life fee would have to increase from $200 to $1,000. Even then, there are still many other difficulties to overcome.

Planning a major event like that requires a huge amount of time, energy, and human power. CEO simply does not have the resources for that. It takes three to five months to plan a major event and there is only one professional staff person to devote his time to CEO; the rest is all done by the incredible hard work of students. In fact, at many universities, concerts are not even a school-sponsored event. Rather, public event management companies rent the space from the college and pay to have the band come and play. Sweet Briar simply does not have a large enough venue to host a popular band. Additionally, many bands won't play for anything less than an audience of 3,000 people. Not only are there not that many students here at Sweet Briar, there also is no place large enough on campus to accommodate that many people.

But the news is not all bad: CEO provides this campus with an amazing and broad range of events, and they do it all on a very small budget. We do incredibly well on our turnout to CEO events. Our overall average for events attendance was 31% of the student body and it was 74% for bands in spring 2004. Compared to the national average of 10% of the student body we get terrific participation even though it may not always seem that way (we are a small school after all). Plus, having a small venue like we do provides us with the opportunity to foster new talent and hear up and coming bands. In case you didn't know, John Mayer played here at Sweet Briar before he became popular. So we have had some big names play here before, we just never knew it at the time.

The organization is run primarily by students and even if you are not officially on the staff, all Sweet Briar students are members of CEO and have a voice in it if they choose to. CEO meetings are every Sunday night at 8:00 in Reid Pit and everyone is welcome to come and have a say in upcoming events. Even if you can't make the meetings you can always email ceo@sbc.edu to get more information, ask questions, and make suggestions, or you can simply flag down one of the students who work for CEO. So come to the events, have some fun, and make this school what you want it to be.