Editorial: SUBOG’s Spring Concert ticket process needs fixing

Weeks ago SUBOG announced that the much anticipated Spring Concert would be Kendrick Lamar and Steve Aoki, much to the surprise of the student body. The concerts in the past few years have been good but Lamar seemed to be universally considered as a big get for SUBOG.

The Spring Concert is rapidly becoming a staple in student’s sense of a UConn tradition. There are certain things that students of any university hold dear to their hearts and thanks to the work by SUBOG in the past few years, the Spring Concert’s popularity is reaching extraordinary levels of significance.

That is why it was distressing to see so many student’s outraged by the inefficient ticket purchasing process for this year’s show. According to first hand accounts and several disgruntled online forums, the concert’s popularity is being marred by the headache to obtain a ticket.

First of all there is the problem with students purchasing the max number of tickets only to sell them to non-students at a much higher cost. This leads to many people who actually go to the university missing out on being able to attend, however, there is really nothing that the SUBOG can do about that issue other than discourage it.

The real issue here is that the process by which SUBOG made students get a ticket was tedious and far too lengthy. Students who won the lottery were brought upstairs to the Student Union Theater, once there they traded it for a ticket to wait in the Ballroom, following that, the hundreds of students were brought back downstairs to wait in line to exchange tickets once again before finally getting in line to purchase their tickets. The process took over two hours for many who were there.

This process happened in the middle of the day on a Monday. While it is not on SUBOG to make sure students don’t skip class, the popularity of their Spring Concert is becoming far too tempting for the average student to prioritize a class ahead of the tradition that is the Spring Concert or the allure of headliner Kendrick Lamar.

This is not meant to be a criticism of SUBOG. The Spring Concert’s popularity is nothing but a positive element of the UConn experience. The issue here is that there was a problem with this year’s efficiency in that it did not match the level of eagerness by the students. As a result, many of the people looking to attend the concert, who went through the proper means, were subject to a frustration that should have been avoidable.