In an effort to increase the quality and quantity of performances on campus, Student Entertainment has formed a new partnership with Waterfront Concerts, whose list of previous performers brought the Darling’s Waterfront Pavilion and other Bangor venues Jason Mraz and The Band Perry, with acts like Dave Matthews Band and Arcade Fire scheduled for the near future.
“When I came in, one of my biggest goals was to get more of a local approach to what we’re doing,” said Patrick Fortier-Brown, vice president of Student Entertainment. “[We were] basically outsourcing all of our work and all of our planning to people in Boston. I wanted to work with Waterfront Concerts [because] what they run … is amazing.”
Waterfront Concerts owner and president Alex Gray credits Fortier-Brown for seeing the potential in collaboration between the two groups.
“I think it really ultimately was [Fortier-Brown] that — smart kid, smart guy — figured it out and reached out to me,” Gray said. “We discussed [it] and I kind of gave him what my concept was for the partnership and I think he liked what he heard, so we had a meeting with […] faculty advisors and we discussed the opportunity.”
“They’re one of the best … They’re definitely the best planning/booking agency in the entire state,” Fortier-Brown said.
“It seems like it’s a perfect partnership.”
Fortier-Brown said that for several reasons, it will be much more convenient having Student Entertainment’s booking agent in the area instead of in Massachusetts.
“When I wanted to meet with the booking agent just to grab lunch, I’d have to drive down to Boston,” Fortier-Brown said. “It works, but it makes it more convenient to just take a 10-minute drive into Old Town, walk into an office and talk to three or four people who can help me.”
The distance also meant that it was more costly for Student Entertainment to ship production equipment up from Boston, another issue that is resolved with the new partnership.
“We were also shipping all our sound, lights, equipment up from Boston, [but Waterfront Concerts has] every bit of that stuff right at the Waterfront,” Fortier-Brown said. “It’s a difference between 8 miles and however many miles Boston is away from here. It cuts down a huge amount of cost in shipping. We already pay them to do our production anyway, so it just makes sense to work with them directly.”
The relationship with Waterfront Concerts will also give Student Entertainment access to better marketing and booking resources, including Ticketmaster, a premiere ticket sales company, and Live Nation, an international live events and concert promotion company. Both companies are owned by parent company Live Nation Entertainment.
“We can sell our tickets on Ticketmaster [and] we can check a variety of stats that are pertinent to planning a show on Live Nation, such as the gross total they usually take, what prices they usually sell their tickets for, what markets they’ve played in [and] what markets they’re going to be playing in,” Fortier-Brown said. “It’s a huge benefit to us.”
According to Gray, he and “two-thirds” of his company’s staff are alumni of UMaine, so he can sympathize with students because he knows “how really, honestly, boring it can be at times” in terms of on- and near-campus entertainment options.
“I had been talking with administrators and faculty advisors and so on in Student Government about why it was that they were using an out-of-state company when it was very clear that there was a company right here in their backyard that could provide, honestly, I think a better service,” Gray said. “And by better, I don’t mean that the other company was doing a poor job. I just feel like the student body could get a lot more out of this just from a partnership basis.”
Although the partnership is young, it has already had an impact. At the Jan. 31 performance by The Band Perry at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor, Waterfront concerts was able to sell 134 student tickets for seats that otherwise would likely have gone unoccupied, according to Gray.
“We offered $15 student tickets, which were [discounted] 65 percent,” Fortier-Brown said. “I also offered free transportation for any student who wanted to go. That helped not only make Student Entertainment look good and give students something good to do on a Friday night, but it helped them fill their seats, so it seems like it’s a perfect partnership.
“With their experience, they can bounce off ideas that they used to do when Student Entertainment was really booming,” Fortier-Brown added.
According to Gray, some of his staff at Waterfront Concerts used to be involved in Student Entertainment when they attended UMaine, and all of them were a part of Bumstock, a popular on-campus concert series that took place annually from 1972 to 2006.
“To learn how to deal with this and this, it’s just… it’s huge.”
Aside from the immediate benefit of improving the ease of providing high-caliber entertainment to UMaine students, Fortier-Brown sees several other benefits to the partnership, such as the opportunity to better utilize on-campus venues and bring a greater variety of acts to UMaine than has been seen in the past.
“We discussed acts that we could put in the CCA, not even particularly just music acts, but just anything that would be practical for the CCA,” Fortier-Brown said. “Things that would be practical to put in the North Pod or the Bear’s Den or anywhere in the Union. Anywhere where we have free space.
“Now, instead of having one big show a semester, we can have a couple good-sized shows and just a bunch of stuff on campus throughout the year. Our goal is to really tailor to every student, give everybody an opportunity to enjoy the activity fee that they’re giving to campus every year.”
Gray agrees with Fortier-Brown that there is a need for more entertainment options on campus and is eager to work with his alma mater to help remedy that.
“This is something I set out to do when I started the company,” Gray said. “I wanted to do this and as I said to Patrick, it’s not really a great concern to me to make a whole lot of money from this, because being a student from the university, we understand how [it can be boring] at times.”
Fortier-Brown has been considering various ideas to liven up Orono-area entertainment, including having a bus that travels between Orono and Bangor to allow students to partake in “pub-crawling, just going to a show at the Cross Center, [seeing a] basketball game, anything like that.
“[We’re trying] to eliminate the imaginary barrier between [Orono and Bangor] that just happens to be called Veazie,” Fortier-Brown said.
Gray also believes there is great opportunity for students in applicable fields of study to get valuable experience by working with Waterfront Concerts in an internship role.
“We’re a large company when it comes to consuming media in the market, so I think that a marketing student from UMaine could gain great real-world knowledge,” Gray said. “We manage a large, six-figure budget annually to market our events. I think a new media student at the University of Maine could find great benefit in an internship here … An accounting major or a computer science major could learn a lot through our ticketing division.”
Fortier-Brown has already experienced this benefit first hand and feels others could learn from it as well.
“The ability to learn personally from these people who just see and do everything perfectly, is huge, not only for me, but for the future of Student Entertainment,” he said. “The ability to throw some students into their office to learn some marketing, to learn some booking stuff, to learn how to deal with this and this, it’s just… it’s huge.”
Gray compared the opportunity for UMaine students to learn from Waterfront Concerts to engineering students and their work opportunities.
“One of the reasons why I know, from my experience being in the engineering program there, why engineering students from Maine flourish is because they tend to gain very great practical knowledge through their internships,” Gray said. “They’re not photocopy jockeys: they learn. They do projects. So that’s one of the other things we wanted to make available to the student body.”
Speaking on the partnership as a whole, Fortier-Brown said, “It’s pretty common-sense and I can’t see why people haven’t done it yet.”
“All I can say is we won’t have a hard time selling tickets.”
What the next show from Student Entertainment will be remains to be seen, but Gray pointed out that there are now more options than ever, ones that had not previously been available or considered.
“[There are performers] that want to play specific college campuses,” Gray said. “Every once in a while, I’ll have an agent call me and say, ‘I want a show, but it has to be on a college campus. It’s part of this college tour, part of that college tour.’ So there might be opportunities where we can sell things to the university and I think they’ll find great benefit.”
Fortier-Brown said that during the next few months, Student Entertainment is “going to be pretty busy” planning for the current and upcoming semesters.
“We’re going to be planning out the majority of our fall semester before this semester is even done, and we’re going to have a solid amount of events,” he said. “We’re going to be having lots of acoustic stuff around campus, we’ll be having lots of stuff outside, lots of outside stuff.”
Although he remained tight-lipped about who specifically is being brought to campus, he disclosed that Student Entertainment has “a pretty fun [show] planned for the summer” that will be announced “some time in the near future.”
Aside from that show, another unannounced performance is also in the works, tentatively scheduled for April 30.
“We had an offer accepted just this last week for a band which I won’t announce yet, but which will be coming out pretty soon, barring contract stuff, approval from the dean, and will probably [be] happening […] the night before Maine Day,” Fortier-Brown said. “It will be a musical act and that’s all I’ll say. Everybody knows them. Everybody knows them. All I can say is we won’t have a hard time selling tickets.”
“Student Entertainment is going to be a lot bigger for the campus.”
With the new partnership with Waterfront concerts in place, Fortier-Brown sees a successful next few years for Student Entertainment.
“I know that even if it’s not fully during my term, with the way we’re changing and how we’re running things and with the way we’re going to be doing things now, in the future, Student Entertainment is going to be a lot bigger for the campus,” Fortier-Brown said. “We’re going to get the best bang for our buck.”
With this new set of resources and personnel in early stages of implementation, Fortier-Brown says this spring semester won’t see too many performances. He did say, however, that “it’s going to be more busy than a regular spring, but it’s not going to be as busy as the springs in the future are going to be.
“It’s not going to be a terribly busy spring semester, but expect a very fun fall.”