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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Concert Board employs new marketing method for Cage Rage

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Seth Hachen of Gentlemen Hall plays his synthesizer and sings during Cage Rage on Nov. 15.

For some Tufts students, mid-November is a time full of hardships, as classes are in their home stretch before finals week and the Medford weather transitions into full-fledged winter. To brighten the mood, Concert Board hosted its signature fall music festival, Cage Rage, this past weekend. The line-up this year consisted of openers “Gentlemen Hall” and “STRFKR” and headliner “MS MR.”

In preparation for Cage Rage, Concert Board employed a completely new marketing strategy this year: creating a Spotify playlist with an array of artists, and deleting a few from the playlist every day until only the three artists performing in the show remained. It also randomly selected 25 of the playlist’s followers to receive a free ticket to Cage Rage.

The idea to use a Spotify playlist as a marketing strategy first arose when senior Kurt Oleson, the Tufts Spotify representative, reached out to the club about potentially collaborating on promoting Cage Rage. Concert Board then decided to publicize the event through Spotify Sound Clash, a national college playlist competition in which the university whose playlist attracted the highest number of followers by Oct. 19 would win $5,000, according to Spotify. Though Tufts’ playlist did not win, the campaign served its publicity purpose, with the playlist topping 450 followers as of Nov. 13.

According to junior and Concert Board Co-President Matthew Marber, Concert Board believed that the Spotify playlist was a success due to its uniqueness and its ability to captivate students. Unlike past methods of advertising such as putting up posters, painting the cannon and making Facebook statuses, the continuously updated Spotify playlist had students constantly thinking about the event and its line-up.

“We’ve never done something like this before,” Marber said. “It’s different in that it engages people before they’re even [at Cage Rage]. It keeps them on their toes.”

According to Marber, using Spotify as the primary outlet for publicity was not without its drawbacks: While having the playlist online kept students engaged for longer periods of time, it also restricted the number of students it could reach, since it relied so heavily on the use of social media.

“[Our] only main approach of promoting the playlist was through social media, and you can’t reach as large a target audience with just social media, because it’s sort of limiting,” Marber said.

Another concern was how little student input was involved in the decision-making process for choosing artists. According to junior and Concert Board Co-President Kathryn Gibb, artists had to be contacted several months in advance for them to feasibly perform at Cage Rage, forcing Concert Board to plan Cage Rage over the summer when getting feedback from students was difficult. Though it was necessary, some students outside the group were frustrated by this lack of input.

“It really would be nice if [Concert Board] took student input into consideration,” senior Maddy Ball said. “It would be cool if there was some way for the rest of the student body to get involved. It’ll help [Concert Board] better act on what the student body has to say.”

Other students noted that the selection of artists over the past few years has not necessarily reflected the interests of the general student body.

“The choices are definitely a bit more [indie], so the music might not be as accessible to a large portion of the Tufts population,” senior Anne Donovan told the Daily in an email. “However, if one of your favorite random [indie] groups gets picked … then that’s exciting for you … I wish that Cage Rage could have been a bit more mainstream names, but I can understand saving the hype for Spring Fling.” Despite the lack of considering student opinion, Concert Board went through an extensive decision-making process before ultimately settling on the three artists for this year’s Cage Rage. In May, the club compiled a list of approximately 100 artists that they could potentially request, according to Marber. After deciding on the balance of openers, headliners and local bands they wanted to bid on, Concert Board began to narrow down its list based on its budget constraint for the event. However, the budget wasn’t all that Concert Board had to keep in mind. Due to the busy schedule of the artists, availability was a huge factor in the decision-making; some luck was necessary for Concert Board to schedule its desired artists, according to Gibb.

“It all comes down to luck,” Gibb said. “That they’re willing to play the show, to play with other artists, etc. — in the past, [we have] missed getting an artist by merely hours, because it is such a time-pressured business and industry.”

According to Gibb, Concert Board opted for “Gentlemen Hall,” “STRFKR” and “MS MR” due to two key aspects shared by the groups: the ability to perform live shows well, and the ability to mix music with other bands’ music effectively. Concert Board wanted to make sure not only that the artists’ music was good, but also that they could put on shows that were captivating for the audience. They found that the artists’ ability to incorporate others’ tunes would be a decisive factor. “Artists that can combine their music with music from other artists … will make the concert feel current and fresh,” Marber said.

Another appeal of the three chosen groups was that they had all already performed at major music festivals this year, such as Coachella, Boston Calling and Bonnaroo, which made this year’s Cage Rage more prestigious.

“We really wanted artists with name recognition,” Marber said. “We’re very happy to say that we [had] three high caliber artists coming this year for Cage Rage.”

 

Correction: November 17, 2014

In a previous version of this article, it was incorrectly stated that the Tufts Spotify playlist garnered 750 followers. In fact, the following was 450 subscribers.