The Spring Party Weekend (SPW) planning committee has decided this year’s headliner will be hip-hop artist B.o.B. The concert will take place on Whitnall Field, on the afternoon of Saturday April 16.

The planning committee is excited about this final decision.

“He’s going to be performing with a full live band, which is dif­ferent from other artists we’ve had in the past few years. It will be a real performance – it should be re­ally good,” sophomore and co-chair for the Concert Committee of the SPW group Markie Cohen said.

The process of choosing an art­ist for SPW is always long, and this year, it was shrouded with rumors and controversy. Many students were in an uproar when the first popular survey was sent around and there were no hip-hop artists included among the options.

“I think that hip-hop is the only genre that helps match the energy, spirit and mentality of Spring Party Weekend,” senior Evan Librizzi said.

This opinion seems to be shared among much of the student body.

“We came up with the first survey because we wanted to see if the Col­gate campus wanted a change from the past in terms of musical genres. It was more of a broad survey, and didn’t include any hip-hop,” Cohen explained. “We just really wanted to get a feel for what people were think­ing. The response was overwhelming­ly negative … so from there we went back to the drawing board.”

“There’s a sizeable minority of students who would much rather have seen a live band and quality music than the most popular name,” sophomore Evan Hammond said.

Cohen explained that the pro­cess has been as democratic as the committee could make it. First of all, any student interested in help­ing to organize the concert was welcomed to join the SPW plan­ning committee. The group brain­stormed musicians and then fig­ured out which of their ideas were possible based on the artist’s avail­abilities and the school’s budget. Then, surveys were created using SurveyMonkey and sent out to the entire campus through Campus Distributions e-mails.

“In our second [and final] survey we kept O.A.R., which won the pre­liminary survey with an overwhelm­ing majority, just to see if people really did want an alternative genre or if they wanted hip-hop instead. In the second survey, B.o.B. won by a landslide – all of the other votes combined didn’t even add up to the votes that B.o.B. got on their own” Cohen said.

The second survey brought in a total of 1644 votes.

For those who would have pre­ferred a different musical style this time, Cohen pointed to the wide range of concerts that the Colgate Ac­tivities Board (CAB) brings to campus throughout the year.

“The thing is, for SPW we have to take into account popular demand, and we checked opinions campus-wide on two occasions with over­whelming results. There will always be people who are not happy, but everyone helps to pay for the concert in some part through their tuition money, so we have to at least make the majority happy.”

This is the first year Colgate has had a committee assigned specifical­ly to work on the SPW concert. In the past, CAB music has worked on bringing the main artist to campus.

This Concert Committee is only one part of the larger SPW committee. Altogether the group has a budget of $80,000, and does everything from hiring the headliner to organizing food and venues to helping coordinate the overall concert schedule.