In Defense of Lawnparties

It's a princeton tradition as established as the senior thesis, the junior paper and Newman's Day. Each year, in late April, as our peer colleges in the Ancient Eight begin announcing the headliners for their spring festivals, a few rabble-rousers at Princeton begin loudly complaining about how our own Lawnparties can't seem to draw anyone more famous than Jurassic 5 (with this spring and last fall's festivals being notable exceptions). Yet no matter what we might like to tell ourselves, the hard truth is that we do the best we can - and in fact, we have it pretty good.

This year's lineups on the Ivy League circuit are fairly hard-hitting. Penn snagged Kid Cudi, Shwayze and Snoop Dogg himself, while Yale managed to get Mike Posner, Matt & Kim, The Ying Yang Twins and MGMT. The magnificent and incredible musicality of The Roots and the surprise appearance of Wale at Tower Club aside, our spring festival looks significantly less, well, festive.

But before we whip ourselves up into a frenzy, it's important to keep a few things in mind. First off, in any normal year, this would have been our second major musical event of the last few months. While Brown and Harvard start the school year off with little more than a parade, we usually get things going with a bang - one that has featured the likes of Lupe Fiasco and Rihanna. To then put on another big concert in the spring takes some serious cash, and it is an expense that our sister schools don't have.

Not only that, but our budget as a whole is simply not as big. With the second-smallest undergraduate population in the Ivy League - we're larger only than Dartmouth - and the USG's budget coming mostly from student fees, we can't offer artists nearly as much money as Harvard or Yale can. This is perhaps one of our greatest hurdles: At the end of the day, big-name musicians are businessmen and, for the most part, they'll go where the money is. More importantly, though, our Lawnparties are the most student-friendly in the Ivy League, and that accommodating attitude comes at a cost. Unlike Penn, which charges its students $35 for tickets for their Spring Fling, and Brown, which also asks its students to purchase tickets, Princeton's two Lawnparties are completely free. No Princeton student will ever have to pay money for a Lawnparties concert, and no Princeton student will ever be told that a Lawnparties is "sold out." Because we don't charge our students, we lose out on potential revenue streams that could be used to woo more expensive and more famous artists.

To be sure, some might say that we would never attract famous-enough artists to sell out a Lawnparties, and to some extent that may be true. What the question becomes, then, is whether we'd be willing to pay for concerts with not only big-name artists, but artists that are beyond big.

In my opinion, the benefits would not necessarily outweigh the costs. Though having an artist like Drake or Kid Cudi might seem to be worth an extra $35, it doesn't preclude the possibility that the actual performance itself will be subpar. On the other hand, The Roots - though they're less mainstream than the headliners at our sister schools' festivals - are absolutely incredible live musicians, and they will be worth every penny.