Concert Board will use the results of an online survey sent to all undergraduates last month to determine which artists will be contacted to perform at this year's annual Spring Fling concert.
Concert Board voted on the five artists in the survey -- Vampire Weekend, The Shins, Snoop Dogg, Kid Cudi and LMFAO -- from an original list of 20 artists that had been suggested by an agent company and that fell within Concert Board's price range, according to Office for Campus Life (OCL) Assistant Director David McGraw.
Concert Board will attempt to get the first choices but recognizes that the first choice will not necessarily be available, according to Concert Board co-chair Nathan Harada.
"We've known from the get-go that it's not 100 percent that the first place is going to be available," Harada, a sophomore, said.
In accordance with Programming Board's policy, the performer will not be revealed until after the contract has been signed, Programming Board co-chair Leo Greenberg said.
Additionally, the winner of the survey will most likely remain a secret, according to Greenberg.
"We can tell you who won the survey, but it might just cause disappointment if it turns out that artist can't come," Greenberg, a senior, said.
An email including the link to the survey was sent through Student Services to all undergraduates on Dec. 14, and the survey closed at the end of finals.
There were slightly over 5,000 responses to the survey, according to McGraw.
Despite rumors that some students found ways to vote more than once, Programming Board will use the votes submitted through the survey to determine the campus' artist preference.
"It is pretty sad that some students think their votes should count more than other people's," Greenberg said.
Since there was never any guarantee that the artist with the highest number of votes would be onstage, OCL did not anticipate that people would feel the need to vote multiple times, McGraw said.
Concert Board monitored the data submitted by the survey throughout the time it was open and was aware of this activity early on, Harada said.
"Even though it may have been possible to vote more than once, we still have a pretty good picture of who the campus wants," he said.
McGraw agreed, insisting that the trend of the votes never changed even after it became clear that some students were attempting to beat the system.
The Tufts Community Union Senate in November allocated an additional $65,000 for Spring Fling, bringing the total Spring Fling budget to $150,000, which means that Concert Board can secure bigger acts this year.
The performers will likely be revealed at one of Concert Board's events later in the semester, Harada said.
The idea for the survey was developed after Concert Board evaluated how campuses comparable to Tufts receive student input. Campus-wide surveys are becoming more and more popular, according to McGraw.
"It's been said for a while that [since] Spring Fling is such a big part of student life, that there should be a more public process for how the artist is selected, so this was our attempt to make that happen," Greenberg said.
Unlike other schools that are somewhat flexible with their concert date, Tufts has one date that is set in stone at the beginning of the year, McGraw said. Combined with the fact that other schools in the Boston area are trying to get the same artists, this makes booking particularly challenging, Harada said.
In spite of the hacking, McGraw said he considers the survey a success.
"The hacking aside, there were very few people who came back with negative responses," McGraw said. "It is something we will look to do again in the future."
There will be a conversation about how to make the survey more secure to prevent students from voting multiple times in the future, according to Greenberg.
