This week, justArts spoke with Director of Concerts for Student Events Benji Bernstein ’15 about the GrooveBoston concert this past Sunday.

justArts: How did you decide on GrooveBoston for the concert?

Benji Bernstein: So this was a long decision process… Last year we were going to have a winter concert. It was going to be Danny Brown, but it actually got snowed out. And we actually were having a lot of trouble selling tickets to that show. It was [in] Levin Ballroom, and for these winter concerts we get a pretty small budget, so what we’re able to do with that budget isn’t usually going to be an artist that has huge mass appeal. And as the student programming board on campus, we feel obligated to get the best entertainment at the best value that will appeal to the most students. So GrooveBoston actually came for senior week last year… and they invited me to go and watch their performance, even through I was a junior, and I loved it. I thought it was awesome. I still wasn’t sold on it, because, as the concerts director, I wanted to have more of a real artist that people would know about. But when we went into their office … they told us their whole pitch, which is that a lot of schools don’t have huge budgets for these concerts, and unless you have a certain amount of money to get people like Jay Z and Justin Timberlake that have this mass appeal, you’re not really going to be able to do [a concert]. So they said that their whole business model is about bringing the entire experience into one thing and sort of taking the emphasis off the artists themselves and actually bringing in lights, incredible sound systems, fog. … It was really like being at an arena for a real concert. But the difference is that it’s not Jay Z. They’re bringing in everything else and they have their own in-house DJ performance team doing the performances. … So if you have a good DJ who is playing fun remixes for everyone, it’s more about the main experience of everything coming together. And that’s why with the lighting and sound and everything, they really sold us on this idea of having a more multidimensional experience. So we were really excited about it.

JA: What was the head count for the concert? Was it what you had hoped?

BB: We actually had, including ourselves, 600 people in there ... We were selling capacity for 650 and so we had almost capacity, so we were just extremely excited. And the thing was, we took a risk on this. I had seen the pitch for the show with a couple other people. We knew that Brandeis would love this. We knew there was a real need here—as you can see with the library [party] getting shut down. People really do really want bigger, more fun, more organized partying events here. And this is exactly that. And so we knew that we had to do whatever we could to show these videos on Facebook [and] email the campus. We just knew that we had to do whatever we could to get people in the door because we knew the show would sell itself, as soon as people say it. So we think that if we turn this into an annual thing, people will be extremely excited about it because we’ve been hearing really good feedback so we’re very excited.

JA: Did you run into any problems or barriers in the planning?

BB: One of the main barriers was that Levin gets booked up extremely quickly. And this was the only date in the winter that Levin really had on a Saturday night. … Obviously we’ve learned that Saturday night has to be the go-to day for our events. So because it was only two weeks into the semester, that obviously creates extra pressure for us, especially when it’s a name that not many people are familiar with, to just market it like crazy. Somebody was joking that we were binge marketing the other day, just posting videos all the time. … At the end of the day, we don’t really have the means to really market it in many other ways besides social media, word of mouth and all of those other things. And yes, we are able to email the school, but you have to focus on social media as our main avenue of marketing. … Our goal was that by the time of the show, everyone on campus would know what to expect from this by seeing all the videos that we were posting. And I think we did meet our goal. Because besides whether the show was going to sell out or not—and it ended up almost selling out—people all knew what it was. So we felt like we had done our part, marketing-wise.

JA: Did you accomplish your goal for the event?

BB: We definitely accomplished our goal in what we think was creating a new event for Brandeis students to really be excited about. Our vision was to create an event that Brandesians are excited about that is not just Spring Fest or not just Pachanga. This could be the new thing. We had good attendance. Like I said, we’ve been seeing comments on Facebook from freshman saying that this was the greatest night of their Brandeis career. … We would just like to see this possibly expand in the future and become something that everyone really looks forward to.