EDITORIAL: Homecoming concert inadequately planned

While The Beacon commends the Homecoming Council for booking a major recording artist for this year’s concert, we believe that the limited number of seats, stage setup, poor effort in advertising, ticket distribution and cost has turned the event into quite the fiasco.

While Lupe Fiasco and Tinie Tempah will perform at FIU Stadium, a venue that holds over 22,000, there are only 7,000 tickets available for the show. The audience placement for the concert will only allow for a little over 15 percent of the 46,000 student population to attend.

Following Athletics’ suggestion of using the football game layout, the stage will be placed on the 10 yard line to face the East end zone. However, this design does not accommodate the most amount of students.

The Beacon believes that placing the stage at the 50 yard line, facing the south side of the stadium, would give more students an opportunity to attend the event.

With this layout, more sections of the stadium are open for seating in the bleachers and on the field, and the committee can utilize the video board to project the concert.

A mere 5,000 free tickets are being offered for the event. Prior to the two weeks leading up to the event, tickets are only being offered once a week for one hour at the Campus Life offices at Modesto Maidique Campus and Biscayne Bay Campus.

Not only does this limit a student’s chance to get their ticket, it can cause serious disturbance in already crowded student areas at both campuses. To alleviate potential issues, we believe that the tickets should have different locations throughout both University campuses to help control the demand and distribution of tickets.

The most troubling of the issues that the Homecoming Council faces is the weak promotion of the limited free tickets available. According to the Homecoming Overall Director Mercy Lavado, the council has promoted the distribution of tickets through their social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter. As of print time, the FIU Homecoming Twitter account only has 234 followers, and the Facebook page could not be found.

Using no other means to promote ticket distribution, we believe that the Homecoming Council should have taken the necessary measures to get the word out.

The University’s official Facebook and Twitter pages have 26,697 likes and 3,503 followers, respectively. With these two web sites alone, the council could notify a higher percentage of students about the distribution of free tickets and give more students a better chance to obtain a ticket.

Unlike last year’s concert, the best seats for the event are on sale. Currently, the tickets are selling for $30 for VIP floor seats and $25 for general admission.

We believe that University students should be provided with discounts for these tickets. These tickets are available to the public, so, basically, anyone can attend the concert. Since this happens to be an event that students have paid for previously with student fees, we feel that students should receive a discount.

The number of tickets and stage layout are set, unfortunately, but the Homecoming Council still has time to reevaluate and restructure their current promotion efforts.