A Look Inside Throwing a Concert for MUIN 425

Photo Credit: Thibault Trillet

By: Lanie Brice ‘24

“You and your group will have to throw a concert as your final exam,” Professor Mike Garcia announced on the first day of MUIN 425. The Live Music Production and Promotion class is either famous or infamous depending on who you ask in the Music Industry program. A required class for all of us in the major, MUIN 425 is one of the most unique we’ll experience. Not only do we learn the basics of how concerts are coordinated and promoted, but we’re thrown directly into the deep end to create one of our own in a very sink or swim environment. I took MUIN 425 this semester, and my show is coming up next week, so I wanted take the time to reflect back on my journey through the class this semester. 

The first step in the semester-long assignment was to find a group. We got to divide ourselves into teams over a very chaotic couple class sections after we got back to campus in person, which meant we did lose a bit of planning time compared to classes in years past. I actually ended up in a group with mostly Marshall majors minoring in Music Industry, so I got to get ot know a brand new group of fellow students that I hadn’t already met in my other major classes. 

In general, we all started with various levels of experience with live music. Many of the people in the class were on Concerts Committee or had experience throwing shows, but the majority of us were complete novices gearing up to produce our first show. While I have attended over 15 shows since last semester, I’d never imagined coordinating one myself. MUIN 425 has definitely peeled back the curtain on how shows are run and made it so that I’ll never look at any show I attend the same way again. In some ways, it’s like Dorthy finding out the truth about the Wizard of Oz at the end of the book, but in other ways, that increased knowledge has made the shows I go see even more magical.

After that, with a budget of around $1,000, we had to start finding a venue, artists, charity, and sponsors, and we quickly learned that putting on the show cost more than any of us imagined. Thrown in headfirst, we had to formulate our own theme and vision for the show to tie all of these moving pieces together. After some discussion, we decided to throw a slumber party themed concert so that students could come from their dorms in their pajamas to the show, and, selfishly, so we could work our event in total comfort. 

Our group broke into teams to handle different aspects of the show. We started working with on campus venues and sent cold emails to over 150 artists that we all loved. One of our team members, Jaja, set up an incredible spreadsheet to keep us all on the same page with how the event was coming together. 

Photo Credit: Josh Sorenson

As a part of the class, there are incremental check-ins to make sure that we’re all staying on task from outlines to mini presentations to announce the dates, themes, and charitable partners. A huge part of the shows that we’re throwing is raising money for a charity that we all cared about. We reached out to a number of charitable partners, and coordinating that was one of our first lessons in the reality that event planning plans often fall through. We ended up supporting a USC charity and organization called The Fam, which we all love. The Fam is a music industry club on campus as well as a nonprofit that works to bring more positivity and collaboration to the industry and, in turn, help improve mental health across the industry. 

Like our professors Mike Garcia and Michael Kaminsky warned us it would be at the start of the semester, it’s been quite the rollercoaster to get so many moving parts to perfectly align. We took many calls that didn’t end up going anywhere, and the show had so many possible versions in our head before we arrived at the final details. There were moments where I wondered if there would be a show and last minute changes that felt like nail-biters, but ultimately, having to figure things out for ourselves did bring a sense of confidence once it all started to come together.

There are certainly times I’ve had mixed feelings about how nearly non-existent the road map for this project has been for such a complex event. But, in the end, it has been a huge learning experience. While our shows are much smaller scale than working on a touring arena show, the project-based approach does offer the most true to life way of figuring out if working in live music or even event planning is the right fit after college. While most of us will probably never throw another show, many of the student production companies that throw house shows around campus were started after students took MUIN 425. 

While I’m certainly not done with the project yet, we are in the home stretch of bringing Slumberfest to Tommy’s Place! If you want to come support our show (and some awesome USC artists), Slumberfest is happening Friday April 8th (next Friday) at 8pm. The line-up includes Jane Honor, Mari, and Ethan Sak. Come ready to make a donation to receive some fun slumber party themed goodies! If you’d like to purchase tickets, they’re $10 online right now on Eventbrite, or they’ll be $12 at the door. I really hope to see you there! While most of the MUIN 425 shows are starting to wrap up, you’ll find fliers for all the remaining events covering tons of different genres and themes papered around campus. 

I never thought that my college experience would include throwing an entire show in only a handful of weeks. And while I normally dread group projects, the collaboration that planning this show has afforded has been super fun. It would be an impossible task to handle alone. There is certainly a value that having to learn as you go provides, and we’ve certainly learned more than we could’ve from memorizing facts for an exam or researching a paper. Though, don’t be fooled, there are still plenty of quizzes and papers that come with MUIN 425. This class is a great reminder of just how unique and wonderful it is to be a part of a program like the Music Industry major at Thornton. 

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