Scheduling the spring concert at Eastern is a lot of planning and balancing students needs and wants with the practicality of the budget and availability of Lantz Arena.

Blake Berenz, a junior marketing major, is one of the University Board concerts co-coordinators and is working on planning not only the spring concert, but is already working on the plans for the Family Weekend concert for the 2015-2016 academic year.

The process is a tedious one that includes a lot of factors that affect who will be performing in Lantz arena next semester.

The planning for the spring concert started as soon as the Family Weekend concert ended.

The UB has an agent that looks for artists who are touring during the spring and are expected to be in the price range that Eastern can afford.

Berenz said he also was looking online and compiled his own list that he gave to the agent.

The agent compiles a list and provides that list of choices to the UB.

That list is then used to create a survey to students. This year’s survey was sent out Friday and a reminder email will be sent out Wednesday.

The format of the survey was changed this year after comments from last year indicated that students were not fond of the format.

Last year the survey had a huge list of artist; this year students choose from two lists of five artists who are tailored to the genres that a student indicates that they prefer.

Another change was in how the genres are organized to clarify and to separate genres that have previously been grouped together.

“Leave comments, I read every single comment, I read every comment from last year too. We will take any information we can get,” Berenz said.

The survey helps Berenz and his co-chair Ashley Eisenbarth narrow down the list of artists and try and choose one that appeals to the most students.

“We just kind of want to get an idea of genre, and then within that genre, what artists are people looking at, can we get an artist similar, or can we get that exact artist. There are just a lot of factors that go into it,” Berenz said.

After a list of approximately 5 artists is chosen by the concert coordinators and then the agent will contact those artists and see if they can perform when Lantz Arena is available and if their current fee fits within the budget.

The concert has to be planned around when sporting events are taking place to ensure Lantz arena is available.

“One (of the comments) that I’m always, always, always going to hear is people want bigger named artists, people want more expensive artists and sometimes that’s just not an option,” Berenz said.

Berenz said some students said they will pay more for better artists, but he wants to make the concert and ticket price appeal to the most students possible.

As of his last check approximately half as many students had taken the survey as last year, but the survey has only been active for half as long, Berenz said.

So far the survey shows that the top genres are pop, rap and country, in no particular order, but only a fraction of the surveys have been completed, said Berenz.

“Take the survey, every single result matters,” Berenz said.

Dominic Baima can be reached at 581-2812 or dmbaima@eiu.edu.