SPB announces Earthgang and Bryce Vine as co-headliners for NAP

and | News Editor and Investigative News Editor

Students hold up their phones as indie-rock band Saint Motel plays at the first-ever Night at the Pageant in 2023. (Zoe Oppenheimer | Staff Photographer)

Washington University’s Social Programming Board (SPB) announced that co-headliners Earthgang and Bryce Vine will be performing at Night at the Pageant (NAP) on Nov. 8.

Earthgang is a hip-hop duo based out of Atlanta made up of two rappers, Olu and WowGr8. The duo are best known for their hit songs “Meditate” and “Sacrifices.” The other headliner, Bryce Vine, is a rapper and singer from New York City, and his top songs are “Drew Barrymore” and “La La Land.”

Tickets for NAP will be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis at the Danforth University Center on Wednesday, Nov. 6 and Thursday, Nov. 7. A total of 1,800 tickets will be allocated to WashU undergraduate students before the concert: 500 tickets will be given to seniors, 500 to juniors, 400 to sophomores, and 400 to first-years. There will also be 200 standby tickets available at the Pageant on the day of the concert, which will be released in accordance with the concert’s capacity. 

Tickets to NAP are free for undergraduate students at WashU. Students must present their WashU ID to pick up a ticket at the DUC. 

NAP first began in 2023 due to financial and time constraints on SPB, and has continued as a lower-cost alternative to a fall Walk In Lay Down (WILD), an annual campus tradition that stopped the fall semester of 2022. 

Unlike WILD, for NAP, students do not fill out a survey to select the artist. Senior Abby Sode — Vice President of Programming at Student Union (SU) who also serves as the head of SPB — explained that there will not be a survey for NAP due to logistical constraints.

“We decided last year, with the inception of NAP, that the survey would be logistically difficult to plan and execute in the short time frame we have to plan NAP,” Sode said. “However, the survey is and will always be an integral part of the process of Spring WILD. “

This is the first year that NAP will have two headliners as a result of a $25,000 increase in the talent budget compared to last year’s concert. According to junior Meris Damjanovic, SU Vice President of Finance, unspent money from SPB’s budget last year may have been placed into this year’s NAP budget.

“At the end of last year, some of that money was retrieved and placed into the Budget and Appeals account … It’s a possibility that some of SPB’s unspent funding from last year went right back to them as supplemental NAP funding,” Damjanovic wrote to Student Life. 

Although SPB cannot accommodate more than 2,000 students due to the size of The Pageant, Sode said that the concert will remain at the proposed venue. She added that SPB used their increased talent budget to bolster higher attendance at the concert.

“The Pageant is the largest concert venue in close proximity to WashU,” Sode said. “Delmar Hall holds less people than the Pageant, and other concert venues around St. Louis are farther, which would require way more funds to execute the concert than [were] given to us to increase the talent budget. Additionally, this increase in the talent budget is a way in which we are hoping to better cater to student tastes and increase attendance.”

When asked why graduate students cannot attend NAP, senior Juan Sanchez — Concerts Director of SPB — said that it is because they do not pay the student activity fee.

“”[I]f we were to allow graduate students, it would take away chances for students who pay that activities fee to attend, and would also mean we would have to charge the grad students for tickets,” Sanchez said. 

According to Sode, NAP is here to stay. 

“NAP is permanent,” Sode said. “We don’t have the budget nor the capacity to pull off two large WILDs. With that in mind, we felt it was important to still offer students a fall concert with NAP.
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