The failure of the Bop...finally, the REAL story.

[scotlandposse2010]

I have been working in the Ents Crew for a year and a half now. For those of you who don’t know, the Ents Crew are the volunteers who sacrifice their time and effort into making sure the events in the Union happen, involving sound, lighting, music, and maintenance of the Union in general. It’s a thankless job; we work our butts off and do it for nothing – but somebody has to.

That being said, however, as hard as we try, for some reason the Union is still not as popular of a place to be as it used to. Perhaps it’s getting old and needs a little renovation. But last year the Union lost thousands of pounds due to general lack of sales and unpopularity. Many of the people I speak to often complain about how the Bop is not their idea of a great night out, and as Rachael Millar pointed out in the Saint’s article on May 3rd last year, ‘of those interviewed the only reason for having fun whilst at the bop was the level of inebriation’. I can’t possibly see how this is a good thing.

I’ve been dabbling in the DJ business for a while now, and having studied music since being very young, I think I can say I know a little something about music. And it is so frustrating for me to go to a Bop and hear the same songs EVERY week. It might not even be that bad if they were at least the same good songs played every week. But alas, such is not the case. It has become so frustrating for me to try to enjoy a night at the Bop that I’ve often gone home in anger at how terrible the music is.

Why? The answer is simple. Remember that the DJs don’t get paid to do it, so it’s not like we’re receiving a performance from a paid professional. It’s quite annoying to go and hear the DJs pump out the best of the NOW albums from two or three years ago again and again, like you’re constantly being hit over the head with a hammer. The problem is that the people who choose the music lack the true artistic talent that a professional musician or disc jockey has. They are merely human jukeboxes; to sound great, you truly have to have a passion for the music – a love for the music that you play, as if it were your religion. Music was my life growing up, so music pretty much is my religion, and it breaks my heart when I go to other universities’ Unions in Scotland and enjoy myself so much more, thinking, ‘Why can’t St Andrews be like this?’ Sure it’s a small town, but we have the capacity to make a Friday night more enjoyable. And it all boils down to the choice of music.

The politics of it all are very frustrating as well; the bureaucracy that runs the Union is like a stubborn mule that just won’t budge. I had a fellow DJ friend try her first night out at the Bop, and the evening was finished by another DJ, who, when asked why he wouldn’t play a song that three people requested, replied, ‘I don’t like that song. They won’t even remember in the morning anyway.’ What kind of a sick answer is that? Shouldn’t you give the people what they want? Then they might actually come to the Union.

The fact is, the Bop only attracts a small percentage of the student population, let’s say around 500 or 600 people who come wasted expecting to hear cheese at its worst. If somehow we could eliminate this small minority and attract the other 6,500 students to the Bop by marketing it as something that would be desirable to attend not necessarily plastered, then I think the Union’s general sales would increase. If we could make the Bop into a place that plays music like a proper nightclub (which is what I imagine most sober people would want), it would quickly become the best place in town for a night out.

Just a thought, but every time I bring this up with Union people, my idea of playing good music is shot down.

[jequirity]

So what types of music would you judge as being "good" out of interest?

[hr]

LEEERRRROYYYY!!!!

Andrew W K Day 9th of May

[Haunted]

An aside.

We work our butts off and do it for nothing

Bollocks.
Don't act as if the ents crew don't get a kick of doing it.
They are not there purely for everyone elses enjoyment but they are there because they want to have a hand in what goes on and they gain great experience that wouldn't look bad on any cv.

[hr]

Now with 100% more corn

[munchingfoo]

A friend of mine who DJ'd at a Tuesday bop for the first time ever was asked not to play a few songs because they weren't what "people" wanted to hear. I seem to remember the reason he agreed to play in the first place was to get something a bit different into the bop.

To be quite frank, I wouldn't care if the song he wanted to play was "Aquatic Sounds 2: Meet the whales" as long as it wasn't the current static set list shambles.

Surely we should let a DJ play what they want in a set, and if it doesn't go down well then you just don't invite them back! I know I complained about a request not being played a while back, but that was because I paid for it. Personally I would rather remove this feature and have a DJ play what they love (with consideration to set progression) rather than play what some drunken idiot wanted. As it stands now though, it seems that the drunken idiot might be able to do a better job of it.

Also, we should consider actually paying DJs again. Perhaps we should also consider paying Ents to stop the normal argument of "... but ents don't get paid either". Its not unheard of for Ents to be paid at other Universities. I know that Abertay pay theirs and their union is tiny.

It astounds me that some people think that the way to make money is always to cut costs. I think the union is in an amazing, if not a tad monopolistic, place to actually increase revenue as its current primary concern. (From the finacial side of course. I don't mean that we should stop the care side to accomdate it)

One area that always bugs me is in bar queues. It is sometimes impossible, in a reasonable amount of time, to get a drink at the bar during buzy hours. Bar staff are one of the least costly and most revenue creating employees in cases like this. Why not have more? If the bar isn't big enough, why not have more satellite bars? (Well done to the person or people who re-introduced the Venue 1 bottle bar).

[Frank]

Quoting scotlandposse2010 from 15:21, 11th Feb 2008we work our butts off and do it for nothing

Bullshit.

Volunteers do what they do for a variety of reasons. Few of them are purely selfless. ('Because I enjoy helping other people': is that selfless or pleasure-seeking [IMO it's both]).

In any case: The other 6500 students are not a single group. I find it remarkable that the Bop is as successful as it really is. This town has nothing else like it. Success or failure, perhaps. The only events that attract a similar or larger amount of people, to my knowledge, are the golf, the plays (spread over a few nights), the balls and last year: Starfields.

All the 'catering to a style' music fails miserably on the large scale. People, in my experience, are just too fussy about music!

Of course, I do think that there's an element worthy of pursuit in the whole thing, but I don't think a hearty grumble about it'll do the trick!

Attracting in a larger number with a better quality of music or musical presentation is achievable, IMO. How to do it, I've no idea. The DJ type folks strike me as the ones to figure it out, but I've no idea how to encourage them to find a solution.

[hr]

"There is only ever one truth. Things are always black or white, there's no such thing as a shade of grey. If you think that something is a shade of grey it simply means that you don't fully understand the situation. The truth is narrow and the path of the pursuit of truth is similarly narrow."
Also, some years later:
"here we are arguing about a few uppity troublemakers with a bee in their bonnet and a conspiracy theory."

[munchingfoo]

Quoting munchingfoo from 15:53, 11th Feb 2008
A friend of mine who DJ'd at a Tuesday bop for the first time ever was asked not to play a few songs because they weren't what "people" wanted to hear. I seem to remember the reason he agreed to play in the first place was to get something a bit different into the bop.

To be quite frank, I wouldn't care if the song he wanted to play was "Aquatic Sounds 2: Meet the whales" as long as it wasn't the current static set list shambles.

Surely we should let a DJ play what they want in a set, and if it doesn't go down well then you just don't invite them back! I know I complained about a request not being played a while back, but that was because I paid for it. Personally I would rather remove this feature and have a DJ play what they love (with consideration to set progression) rather than play what some drunken idiot wanted. As it stands now though, it seems that the drunken idiot might be able to do a better job of it.

Also, we should consider actually paying DJs again. Perhaps we should also consider paying Ents to stop the normal argument of "... but ents don't get paid either". Its not unheard of for Ents to be paid at other Universities. I know that Abertay pay theirs and their union is tiny.

It astounds me that some people think that the way to make money is always to cut costs. I think the union is in an amazing, if not a tad monopolistic, place to actually increase revenue as its current primary concern. (From the finacial side of course. I don't mean that we should stop the care side to accomdate it)

One area that always bugs me is in bar queues. It is sometimes impossible, in a reasonable amount of time, to get a drink at the bar during buzy hours. Bar staff are one of the least costly and most revenue creating employees in cases like this. Why not have more? If the bar isn't big enough, why not have more satellite bars? (Well done to the person or people who re-introduced the Venue 1 bottle bar).

[hr]

[s]Warning : The sinner is a plateau, with moral high ground manifesting itself as an optical illusion in the the bearers mind.[/s]

[hr]

[s]Warning : The sinner is a plateau, with moral high ground manifesting itself as an optical illusion in the the bearers mind.[/s]

[Haunted]

Whatever happened to that nightclub out at the farm?

[hr]

Now with 100% more corn

[orudge]

Well, it's all very well saying that the bop needs to change, and that it's just the same every week (often, this is indeed basically the case), but in the past, whenever people have tried to introduce "new" or "different" styles of music to the bop, the punters have generally not liked it. It's the old thing - people moan about the bop being nothing but cheese, but when we introduce something new, they moan that there's no cheese. Anyway, the past few bops I've been to I've found to strike a reasonable balance between cheese and other music (eg, dance, rnb), with the cheese often coming on later in the evening (the last hour or so), when people really want to dance to it.

And yes, there may be 6500 other students out there, but when we've advertised different nights in the past, they don't seem to have come. Do you have some way of enticing them in? The problem with changing the Friday bop is that, even if some don't like the kind of music it normally plays, it does remain very popular amongst many students, and if you change it too much, then they may not come back week after week bringing much-needed income to the union. Many have tried to change the bop over the years, few have managed it.

[hr]

http://www.owenrudge.net/
http://standrews.facebook.com/profile.php?id=37103734

[starsandsparkles]

The worst bops, in my opinion, are the ones where you can't easily dance to the music because it's either a long boring stream of dance/trance/house style or the DJ is playing little known songs.

People just want cheese because it's well known and easy to sing/dance to. Most chart music would perform the same function, so it doesn't have to be the same old songs all the time.

[munchingfoo]

One thing that I would note from my experiences with rocksoc and set lists si:

No matter what music you choose someone somewhere will complain. Thats a fact.

You should never therefore use someone complaining about a new choice in music as an excuse to fall back into the old ways.


Like I said previously, I'm at the stage now, after 6 years of listening to the same stuff, that I would rather have a night of demolition man style jingles, just for a change. The same hardcore group of drunks will go to the bop no matter what you play. (almost)


What you need to attract is the people who won't. It may be the case that you won't be able to attract all of those people on the same night either.

The fact that the union DJs even say, "well what would you want to hear instead", pretty much sums up the problem. The worse thing that we could do is to get rid of one style of static set list and then to replace it with another style of static set list.

[hr]

[s]Warning : The sinner is a plateau, with moral high ground manifesting itself as an optical illusion in the the bearers mind.[/s]

[munchingfoo]

Quoting orudge from 16:23, 11th Feb 2008
And yes, there may be 6500 other students out there, but when we've advertised different nights in the past, they don't seem to have come.

In particular reply to this - yes, but have you ever given any of these nights a Friday? The day when you know most people go out.

The bop is sometimes dead on a Saturday - how can you then possibly justify saying genre X didn't work because we played that on Saturday and no one showed up.

[hr]

[s]Warning : The sinner is a plateau, with moral high ground manifesting itself as an optical illusion in the the bearers mind.[/s]

[orudge]

Quoting munchingfoo from 17:04, 11th Feb 2008
In particular reply to this - yes, but have you ever given any of these nights a Friday? The day when you know most people go out.

Well, I don't believe there's ever been a drastic "change" of event on a Friday night while I've been here, but there have been Friday nights when the DJ has played less (or no) cheese. I can't remember what numbers were like on those nights (I don't think the place was packed, but it wasn't empty, either), but on a few of those occasions, there were a fairly significant number of requests on the text the DJ system asking for cheese. Also, not a scientific measure by any means, but the majority of the people I spoke to didn't particularly like the music and were wanting the same old stuff back. OK, not representative of all students on a Friday night, but it seems a lot of the regular bop-goers don't want things to change too much.

[hr]

http://www.owenrudge.net/
http://standrews.facebook.com/profile.php?id=37103734

[exnihilo]

It's not a question of playing a bit less cheese on a Friday, that achieves nothing because those people are already in there. If you want to change things you have to choose a Friday in advance, come up with a concept and a style you want to push and advertise it heavily. You have years of inertia to overcome and the whole point is to try to appeal to those people who are NOT regular bop goers.

This has been tried in the past, sometimes with DJs from elsewhere doing it or in conjunction with a particular society, and people have not only paid to come they have come in their droves and we've made a lot of money from it. Obviously that won't work every week, but it might be worth taking a look back at how those events differed from a generic bop and emulating them. And, if you have a DJ or two who are very good and who are popular, damn well pay them anything else is no saving at all - it's imbecility.

[Midget]

I have heard this so many times before, deja vu just doesn't come close.

This bit (apart from your own opinions of course) seemed to be the only real evidence you had that the bop was disliked by other students:

Quoting scotlandposse2010 from 15:21, 11th Feb 2008 Many of the people I speak to often complain about how the Bop is not their idea of a great night out, and as Rachael Millar pointed out in the Saint’s article on May 3rd last year, ‘of those interviewed the only reason for having fun whilst at the bop was the level of inebriation’.

Many people if asked if they masturbate will say no and say its disgusting.
A Saint article, from last year, like the Sun bashing illegal drugs (they do it all the time doesn't mean the reporters don't take them). And I know for a fact that Miss Millar is not Bop-shy.
Level of Inebriation -couldn't this be applied to any number of different pursuits and events in St Andrews?

[exnihilo]

Or to applying in the first place!

[Mehmsy]

Thanks for posting this real story. I'm really glad it's not a subtle whimper about how they didn't let you play your special and expert music.

The Bop is the Bop and everyone knows that. It caters to a specific crowd; St. Andrews has plenty of other places to go if dancing to cheesy music isn't your thing -- especially if you want to go and listen to music that caters to a more specific taste.

[hr]

http://standrews.facebook.com/profile.php?id=37106593

[schmod]

It's a tough line to walk. People want to hear something other than cheese, but when we deviate too far from the norm, people either don't show up, or awkwardly shuffle their feet around the floor.

If you want to hear something at the Bop that isn't cheese, I'd recommend showing up between 10 and 12. We usually try to fill those hours with the sort of music you'd hear at a "real" club, and there is generally much less cheese played.

Over the weekend, I went to Edinburgh's Cheese-Bop, and wasn't all that impressed with their music selections over our own.

Personally, I like to keep the cheese to a minimum in my own sets, especially avoiding the list of tunes that got played to death toward the end of last semester. However, there's no denying the fact that the crowd reacts positively to certain tunes.

Any suggestions of what we *should* play that won't offend the masses? It's very easy to criticize the Bop without offering any sort of constructive advice that won't bankrupt the Union.

[schmod]

It's a tough line to walk. People want to hear something other than cheese, but when we deviate too far from the norm, people either don't show up, or awkwardly shuffle their feet around the floor.

If you want to hear something at the Bop that isn't cheese, I'd recommend showing up between 10 and 12. We usually try to fill those hours with the sort of music you'd hear at a "real" club, and there is generally much less cheese played.

Over the weekend, I went to Edinburgh's Cheese-Bop, and wasn't all that impressed with their music selections over our own.

Personally, I like to keep the cheese to a minimum in my own sets, especially avoiding the list of tunes that got played to death toward the end of last semester. However, there's no denying the fact that the crowd reacts positively to certain tunes.

Any suggestions of what we *should* play that won't offend the masses? It's very easy to criticize the Bop without offering any sort of constructive advice that won't bankrupt the Union.

[schmod]

It's a tough line to walk. People want to hear something other than cheese, but when we deviate too far from the norm, people either don't show up, or awkwardly shuffle their feet around the floor.

If you want to hear something at the Bop that isn't cheese, I'd recommend showing up between 10 and 12. We usually try to fill those hours with the sort of music you'd hear at a "real" club, and there is generally much less cheese played.

Over the weekend, I went to Edinburgh's Cheese-Bop, and wasn't all that impressed with their music selections over our own.

Personally, I like to keep the cheese to a minimum in my own sets, especially avoiding the list of tunes that got played to death toward the end of last semester. However, there's no denying the fact that the crowd reacts positively to certain tunes.

Any suggestions of what we *should* play that won't offend the masses? It's very easy to criticize the Bop without offering any sort of constructive advice that won't bankrupt the Union.

[schmod]

It's a tough line to walk. People want to hear something other than cheese, but when we deviate too far from the norm, people either don't show up, or awkwardly shuffle their feet around the floor.

If you want to hear something at the Bop that isn't cheese, I'd recommend showing up between 10 and 12. We usually try to fill those hours with the sort of music you'd hear at a "real" club, and there is generally much less cheese played.

Over the weekend, I went to Edinburgh's Cheese-Bop, and wasn't all that impressed with their music selections over our own.

Personally, I like to keep the cheese to a minimum in my own sets, especially avoiding the list of tunes that got played to death toward the end of last semester. However, there's no denying the fact that the crowd reacts positively to certain tunes.

Any suggestions of what we *should* play that won't offend the masses? It's very easy to criticize the Bop without offering any sort of constructive advice that won't bankrupt the Union.