The 2013 Movin’ On festival is still more than half a year away, but with the advent of the fall season comes the CORE committee’s early efforts to put together a crowd-pleasing lineup.
The first of two surveys to determine the lineup was released last Friday, Sept. 21 via surveymonkey.com and asks students to list the bands they would like to see perform and rank 16 genres according to their musical preferences.
According to Movin’ On Director of Marketing Karisa Maxwell, the festival’s CORE committee is currently putting together its budget proposal for this year’s event. Once this is finalized, the committee will be able view students’ suggested performers and figure out whether it is within the realm of possibility to bring some of them to the campus.
The second survey will be conducted sometime in the next few weeks once enough data has been compiled, said Maxwell.
Unlike previous years, Maxwell said the second phase of the survey will be more of a “grassroots” campaign designed to generate more random, yet more accurate feedback from the student body.
Members of the event committee will conduct interviews with downtown State College passersby as well as set up an outlet inside the HUB-Robeson Center for students to visit and voluntarily vote.
Tim Gould, the festival’s overall director, said this part of the survey will entail asking students to give their two cents on any of the acts pigeonholed from the first survey as the most popular.
While there are a number of additional logistics to consider, including financial concerns, tour date conflicts, and the bands’ ability to interact with fans onstage, both Maxwell and Gould insist that these have no affect on the importance of student participation.
“That’s the first thing we look at,” said Gould (senior-geobiology). “We go after what the students want first.”
Gould said the committee briefly flirted with the idea of downplaying the festival’s level of musical diversity in favor of a universal theme, which would contrast greatly from last year’s headlining duo of folk rockers The Avett Brothers and rapper Ludacris.
However, Maxwell said it’s the festival’s eclectic nature that draws such a wide audience in the first place.
“We attract as many fans as possible to come out [to the concert],” Maxwell said. “If a band performs well live, we’ll definitely take them into consideration.”
“We want to make this as Penn State-friendly as possible,” she said.
The headliners for this year’s event will be announced before winter break, and though the space for the festival has not yet been reserved, Gould promises it will be scheduled for the last Saturday in April.
