The concert only cost $21.50. The opener had an album peak at No. 19 on the 2023 Billboard Top 200, the main act won Group of the Year and Rock Album of the Year at the 2024 JUNO awards, and yet, only 122 people registered.
Two weeks ago — just over a week before the date of their performance — the Leadership, Engagement and Experiential Development Office (LEED) announced that rapper Toosii and alternative indie group The Beaches would be featured at this year’s Spring Fair Concert. Scrambling to spread the news on such short notice, The News-Letter did what they could to ensure students knew about the event. But clearly, it wasn’t enough. Because of this, the artists were faced with a crowd of around 122 people, which was a near 90% drop-off from the 1,102 attendees of the Fall 2024 Concert.
Many will state with unfounded confidence that these musicians were paid to do a job, implying that money should be their only incentive. But anyone in that room with an ounce of sympathy would have noticed the uncomfortable air. Toosii, though he made the best of the situation, repeatedly referenced the small crowd, saying that “no matter if there’s ten people, five people, one person,” his only goal was to make them “fall in love” with him. Jordan Miller, the lead singer of The Beaches, said it felt like they were performing for a high school prom. These comments cut like a knife. Even when you address the elephant in the room, it doesn’t make the elephant less embarrassed.
STEVEN SIMPSON / PHOTO EDITOR
Southern rapper Toosii bears his heart out, despite the poor attendance.
I don’t want any of this to take away from the performances themselves. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by how the performers responded to such a poor showing. Toosii handily won the audience over by walking into the crowd itself. After rapping in the center of an astounded circle of audience members, he then singled someone out and asked if they knew King Von, and the student just so happened to be from Chicago. Toosii then performed King Von’s “Crazy Story,” during which he took off his chain and put it on the Chicago native. Something like this would have never happened in a larger crowd, so, at least in some respects, the attending students had little to complain about.
But despite these heroic efforts, I couldn’t ignore the feeling that this whole event was a catastrophic failure from LEED’s perspective. They likely lost tens of thousands of dollars on this concert, and, even worse, they somehow lost the trust of the student body in the process. For those who can overlook the financial burden, the startlingly low attendance was an even more damning symbol of the Hopkins administration’s incompetence.
The question then becomes, why was the attendance so catastrophically bad? Could it be that Hopkins students were simply uninterested in the chosen artists? Or was it the short notice, given that the announcement detailing the performing artists came out a week before the event? Both of these are somewhat correct. As the News & Features section covered last week, students felt like the chosen artists didn’t reflect the wishes of the student body. With other schools like Yale University booking popular artists like Ken Carson, it's easy to see why some students may be disappointed. To make matters worse, the poorly-timed announcement likely left many students unaware that the event was even happening.
But if I were to take an educated guess, I would say that the biggest reason for this concert’s low attendance was the date itself. For those unaware, Spring Fair normally takes place after the last day of classes. This allows the perpetually busy Hopkins students to get all their remaining coursework done before Spring Fair, so that, among their studying for finals, they can take a break and enjoy what Spring Fair has to offer. This year, many students had classes on the Monday following Spring Fair, which left many students unable to attend certain events. The Spring Fair Concert — though dealing with other circumstances — was likely hurt by this as well.
STEVEN SIMPSON / PHOTO EDITOR
Jordan Miller, the lead vocalist of The Beaches, referred to the Hopkins crowd as a "prom."
One potential route to make the Spring Fair Concert more popular among the Hopkins student body that I have floated among friends for quite some time is to reach out to popular artists from Baltimore such as Beach House, Turnstile or Snail Mail. I don’t pretend to know the logistics of signing performing artists for an event like this, but I do know that many recent Spring Fair Concert lineups have felt disconnected from the community at large — narrowing our focus to local legends could revitalize a hallmark of the student experience.
I am not here to offer a definitive plan for LEED to get better at actually “engaging” the Hopkins student body. That is not my job. But I can say with certainty that LEED, with their handling of this event, not only failed the Hopkins student body, but also the artists they partnered with to put on a good show. This is the sort of event that disincentivizes popular artists to perform for the Spring Fair Concert in the first place — after this, it may be hard to gain the trust of prospective artists in the future.
