As the weather gets warmer and the days grow longer, the count-down to Spring Party Weekend (SPW) hits just four weeks. For months now, students have been highly anticipating the answer to a single question: Who will be this year’s headliner? On March 8, just before spring break, the anticipation was finally over. The SPW Committee made the an-nouncement through their web-site, spw2012.com, that this year’s performer will be none other than electronic house DJ and record producer Tim Bergling, known professionally as Avicii.

The 22-year-old Swedish remix artist emerged in the music in-dustry for the first time in 2008. Since then, he has become one of the world’s most well-known elec-tronic musicians, with his most successful song, “Levels,” making it onto the top 10 charts in over a dozen different countries.

The electronic house genre that Avicii is famous for certainly has a different style than that of the hip hop artists who headlined SPW in recent years, such as Lupe Fiasco in 2009, Fabolous in 2010 and B.o.B. in 2011.

Avicii was chosen by the Spring Party Weekend Committee in ac-cordance with popular opinion. The Committee is made up of students from all class years, including SPW interns sophomore Alex Fisch and senior Matt Harnisch, who work with the Center for Leadership and Student Involvement (CLSI) to se-lect the artist that best satisfies the student body’s interests.

The Committee initially com-piles a list of artists from stu-dent suggestions. This list is then narrowed down based on those performers who fit into the appropriate price range and are available to play during the dates of SPW. Back in Decem-ber, students got the opportu-nity to voice their opinion in a campus-wide survey on the Spring Party Weekend website that contained artists such as Flaming Lips, Calvin Harris, Afrojack, J. Cole, Gym Class Heroes, Benny Benassi, OAR, Mike Posner, Big Sean, Spoon, Wale and Third Eye Blind.

“Once the students have vot-ed, the Committee works from this point to select and secure the best artist for the students,” Associate Director of CLSI Ten-nille Haynes said. “This is a long process, as it consists of negotia-tions, availability and our abil-ity to handle the production and needs of the performer based on our resources.”

The polls made the popularity of a possible Avicii performance clear-cut. However, securing a performance from a world-re-nowned artist is no simple task, let alone getting them to come to a small town in Central New York. But through its collabora-tion with Chegg and the Text-books and Tickets tour, the SPW committee was able to make this performance a reality.

“Textbooks and Tickets is a company within Chegg that pro-duces shows around the United States that promote Chegg while also providing students at uni-versities with a great concert to attend,” SPW Intern and sopho-more Alex Fisch said. “We had a great opportunity come our way to work with them and collabo-rate on bringing Avicii to Col-gate for Spring Party Weekend.”

Avicii will be performing on Friday, April 20, from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. inside of the Sanford Fieldhouse. Although the SPW concert was initially scheduled to take place on the afternoon of April 21, the date was changed to accommodate Avicii, who is scheduled to play in Las Vegas that Saturday. There are cur-rently no opening acts set to perform before the headliner.

Contact Cody Semrau