Offset, JT, Ravyn Lenae, Zack Fox and the Undertow Brass Band will perform at Spring Weekend 2025, the Brown Concert Agency announced at a midnight release party on Friday.
This year’s festival will be a one-day event on Saturday, April 26. In preparation for the event, members of the BCA spent much of the year negotiating prices and sending bids to artists.
“I am fucking excited,” Mahir Arora ’25 said in an interview at the party.
The Herald also spoke to Ava Filiss ’25, who added that she is “so excited for Ravyn Lenae.”
Paula Romero ’28 said that she understands “why people were excited for the lineup.” She added that while she only knows about “one song” per artist “all from TikTok," she thinks “Offset is huge,” pointing out that he was a member of the hip-hop group Migos.
In an interview with The Herald, BCA Co-Head Tanya Qu ’25 emphasized the agency’s attempt to incorporate student feedback into their decision-making process.
“We really wanted to take into account what we were seeing with last year’s Spring Weekend and the feedback we got,” Qu said. A poll sent to students last fall asked whether respondents would prefer a one-day festival with more prominent performers or a two-day festival with more affordable performers.
After 52.8% of the 1,348 respondents voted in favor of the former option, the BCA announced that the 2025 festival would be a one-day event with three to four artists. The one-day format of this year’s festival was a “choice rather than something we were forced to do” because of budget cuts, BCA Co-Head Vincent Moroz ’25 told The Herald.
Spring Weekend was also a one-day festival in 2024, when the BCA faced budget cuts of over $250,000 from the previous year and could not afford to bring artists to campus across two days.
The BCA’s fall poll also gave organizers insight into “the artists and type of music” that the student body would enjoy at this year’s festival, Qu said.
Moroz said the poll results were largely as they “expected,” noting that over 900 participants selected pop music in their top three preferred genres. Yabeke Zike ’25, one of the BCA co-heads, said this year’s data helped the agency “frame who we reached out to.”
In the past, the BCA has struggled to balance catering to campus-wide preferences and “choosing an artist (the BCA is) really excited about,” Moroz said.
There are “very slim chances that you can appease 8,000 people on campus,” Zike said. But the BCA is “all really excited about the names we have coming.”
Ahead of last year’s festival, the organization faced backlash over the artist lineup and release poster, with some community members complaining to SAO that the poster was “explicitly antisemitic.”
In a statement released by the BCA at the time, the agency rejected “the notion that the lineup or poster contains antisemitic sentiments in any way” and said that it condemns “all forms of racism and identity-based harassment that have arisen in response to our lineup and poster.”
In the BCA’s fall poll, many students expressed differing and often contradictory opinions, Qu said. According to Qu, while some students want to see an artist this year who performs primarily in a language other than English, others complained they “didn’t understand any of the words” sung by Elyanna, one of last year’s performers who sings primarily in Arabic. Other students critiqued the “overrepresentation” of hip-hop in last year’s festival, while some argued that the performers were “too chill” to headline the festival.
These opposing views posed a challenge for the BCA, which hoped to appease the diverse music tastes on campus. Despite receiving over 1,300 responses on the poll, the BCA “really wanted to listen to people” when organizing this year’s festival, Qu said.
But “at the end of the day, it’s a concert for students, by students,” Zike said. “Expect to have a good time and be prepared to have fun — that’s what it’s all about.”
Talia LeVine is a section editor covering arts and culture. They study Political Science and Visual Art with a focus on photography. In their free time, they can be found drinking copious amounts of coffee.
