By Steph Wiechmann
Concert ticket giveaways should be a hit with the college students, but Washinton and Lee's WLUR-FM is having trouble finding people to take free seats at local shows. According to the campus radio station, Rockbridge area and campus communities don't share the radio station's taste in newer pop music.
Corbin Blackford, WLUR's local events publicity director, said WLUR receives at least one set of tickets a month from two venues in Charlottesville--Satellite Ballroom and Starr Hill Brewery and Music Hall. These stages showcase up-and-coming bands from around the nation including State Radio, Of Montreal and The Pietasters.
Jeremy Franklin, WLUR general manager, classifies most acts as “modern college rock,” which is similar to the music played on the majority of shows on WLUR. However, the station has given away tickets to concerts in other music genres, including bluegrass and hip-hop.
WLUR gives away tickets as a service, said Franklin. Its main goal is to help Satellite Ballroom and Starr Hill publicize their shows. “People know what’s going on whether the show’s in Lexington or Charlottesville,” said Franklin.
Blackford decides which shows will handle the ticket giveaways, and he has a strategy. “I tend to give tickets to DJs who have mid-afternoon or early evening shows,” said Blackford, who emphasized that this is when the station is most likely to have the most listeners. “When possible,” he said, “I try to match up the radio show's genre with the concert's genre.”
But even with a strategy, WLUR does not get the response it should as one of the few stations in the Rockbridge area with giveaways.
Anthony Nardini, a WLUR announcer, recently gave away tickets to the March 1 Satellite Ballroom show featuring the bands Of Montreal and The M's. “On our show, we had to announce the ticket giveaway three times before we received even a single call,” he said. A W&L student won the tickets.
Another announcer, Kendall Murphy, had the same problem when she gave away tickets to a Feb. 28 Starr Hill show featuring State Radio. The giveaway was the first she had ever handled. “I thought I'd make the fifth person the winner,” she said, “but someone gave me sound advice: take the first caller.” The first caller, who won the tickets, was a Lexington resident.
The low response to ticket giveaways is not new to WLUR, said W&L Professor Bob de Maria. De Maria ran the station for 24 years, when it was housed in Reid Hall and part of the journalism curriculum.
During those days, the station only gave away tickets for Student Activities Board concerts--when they could get them. The station spent a lot of time and money publicizing the giveaways, said de Maria.
The tickets generated a lot of calls “if it was somebody who was popular,” said de Maria. He remembers B.B. King and Phish concerts as examples. Otherwise, he said, there was little response.
Franklin has a few theories about why the tickets aren’t flying out of the studio.
One is proximity. Charlottesville, he said, is a two-hour round trip, and many students and community members are too busy to make it to a show during the middle of the week. Another problem may be that WLUR is not publicizing the giveaways enough.
Like de Maria, Franklin, Blackford and the rest of the WLUR staff agree that the major problem with the ticket giveaways are the music acts themselves. Most concerts are for little-known bands, and Franklin said these don’t appeal to the W&L or the Rockbridge communities.
“There is a large percent of apathy towards music that people aren’t familiar with,” Franklin said.
He said that even shows done on the W&L campus with newer bands are not well attended.
“A lot of people don’t know what’s out there,” he said.
Blackford said that the ticket giveaway problem could be solved if the community just took a chance on new music. “Sometimes the best way to find new music is to listen to it live,” he said.
Murphy encourages WLUR listeners to call in. “For large radio stations, it's almost impossible to even get through,” she said. “But with WLUR, you have a great chance of actually winning.”
Produced by Washington and Lee journalism students.
Lead supervisor: Prof. Claudette Artwick
Reporting supervisor: Prof. Doug Cumming
Editing supervisor: Prof. Pamela Luecke
Technical supervisor: Michael Todd