R&B singer Trey Songz will headline the Student Association’s fall concert at 8 p.m. on Oct. 29.
Songz (his real name is Tremaine Neverson) is currently touring for his sixth album, “Trigga,” released this past summer. He follows the trend of other hip-hop artists brought by the SA’s Programming Board to perform during the fall. In the fall of 2013, J. Cole performed, preceded by Childish Gambino and Afrojack in 2012, and Wiz Khalifa in 2011.
According to Stephanie Zagreda, SA vice president for programming, hip-hop musicians have been the most requested artists on the Programming Board’s surveys for at least the past three years, including on Spring Fling surveys, when a pop-rock artist is usually the headliner. The genre’s artists beat out all others by a margin of more than 20 percent in this year’s fall concert survey.
Trey Songz came in third in this year’s survey. Iggy Azalea was the most requested artist, but Zagreda said that she was only available on a Sunday, and the Programming Board decided they didn’t want to have a Sunday show. It would have cost about the same amount for the SA to book Iggy Azalea as it costs to book Trey Songz, because at the time the Programming Board put in a bid for her to perform, her profile wasn’t as big as it is currently. Bastille, the second choice in the poll, turned out to be unavailable.
The Programming Board will announce the concert’s opening acts later in the week, and Zagreda said that one opening act will be an EDM artist. Sources with knowledge of the matter say the Chainsmokers (their big song is “#Selfie”) are in negotiation for an opening act, but Zagreda will neither confirm nor deny that they are slated to perform.
The Events Center’s stage isn’t big enough for everything that each artist wants in their stage productions, Zagreda said. She’s setting up a new plan that will give the openers about 15 feet of stage space to work with, and is currently negotiating with one of the artists to try to give them a majority of what they want while still keeping the full scale of Songz’s set and keeping the changeover time between acts fast.
“As soon as I can get them to agree to the layout that I sent them last week, then we’re good to go,” Zagreda said.
When the openers finish, the curtain behind them will pull up to reveal Songz’s set on the rest of the stage.
“We have three weeks until the show,” Zagreda said. “It’s going to be a lot of production in a short amount of time, but it’s going to be good. It’s going to be just as big, production-wise, as J. Cole was.”
Since Friday evening, days before the SA officially announced Songz’s performance, the Binghamton University Events Center’s ticketing website revealed that he would be coming. “Trey Songz” was included in the list of upcoming performances, alongside Nick Offerman.
Zagreda said the information went online early due to a mistake from the person who set up the ticketing page on the website.
“When he was building the page, it ended up getting published at the time of setup, instead of being hidden until the release date,” Zagreda said.
The SA will sell 300 tickets at the presale price of $20 in the SA Ink office today, Tuesday Oct. 7 from noon to 4 p.m.
Normal ticket sales will begin on Wednesday, Oct. 8. They will be available online at 6 a.m. on the Event Center’s website and at the Events Center Box Office from 12-4:30 p.m. Tickets for students are $25 plus fees and public tickets are $35 plus fees.