The undergraduate Student Association (SA) will no longer be continuing its traditional Fall and Spring Fest series and will now switch to having one annual Fest due to increasing costs and declining student attendance, SA President Samin Bhuya said in an email to The Spectrum Saturday evening. SA’s Bullsapalooza — a campus-wide fair — is intended to replace the second Fest in the future.
The Fall and Spring Fest series is one of SA’s largest and most expensive events, with one Fest costing approximately $650,000 to $750,000 according to Bhuya. 2023-24’s Spring Fest cost SA approximately $700,000 and this year’s Fall Fest was just under $600,000 — the drop in expenses was due to Cash Cobain’s last-minute absence from the show.
SA could not budget for another Spring Fest this year due to the rising costs, primarily in artist and talent fees.
The two concerts are funded by the mandatory $109 student activity fee, subject to vote every two years.
Bhuya said the overall cost is more than double what it was when SA first started hosting Fest and is “only getting more expensive.”
“To plan, fund and manage one Fest requires 4-6+ months of logistics planning; it’s a complicated balancing act between finding the most frequently suggested artists by students who are feasible as well as interested in performing here and available on select dates that are dictated by the University,” Bhuya wrote in an email to The Spectrum.
Combined with declining attendance, Bhuya called the concerts “no longer sustainable.” According to Bhuya, approximately 2,000 students attended this year’s Fall Fest: a drop of about 5,000 from Spring Fest’s turnout of 7,000 last year.
SA Entertainment Coordinator Marc Rosenblitt told The Spectrum that the decline had been happening over the course of a decade in an interview Monday afternoon.
“It’s not like something that just happened overnight. Just over the years, people are less and less interested in going to a Fest. And it used to be one of our big problems actually for a long while; we were turning people away that would get angry and what not out in the front of the arena.” Rosenblitt said. “We haven’t had that problem in well over a decade.”
About $350,000 — consisting of leftover funds this year’s Fall Fest, along with funds originally earmarked for concerts for the 2024-25 term — will be directed towards the Bullsapalooza, a campus-wide fair intended to replace the second Fest in the future.
“We’re bringing the fun and diversity of a state fair directly to campus, and we’re doing it all for roughly less than half the cost of one single Fest,” Bhuya wrote.
SA has already allocated $182,250 of the Bullsapalooza budget to production costs, security and activity expenses, according to the SA general ledger.
Rosenblitt says that Fest is not fiscally reasonable.
“One of the biggest things that we want to make sure of is that we’re being as good stewards of the student mandatory activity fee as we possibly can,” Rosenblitt said. “It’s just when you really knuckle down on Fest, it’s just grown out of control.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article inaccurately stated the Bullsapalooza budget is being funded by leftovers from the 2023-24 Spring Fest. We regret this error.
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor and can be reached at mylien.lai@ubspectrum.com.
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor at The Spectrum. Outside of getting lost in Buffalo, she enjoys practicing the piano and being a bean plant mom. She can be found at @my_my_my_myliennnn on Instagram.
