Though successful, Juice Jam can expand, embrace format of common music festivals

University Union took a step in the right direction with this year’s Juice Jam Music Festival, but there is still opportunity to better embrace the music festival format.

This year, Juice Jam evolved from a single-stage show to a two-stage event featuring six acts: Kendrick Lamar, Nicky Romero, Robert DeLong, Smallpools, The Neighbourhood and Ab-Soul.

Further considerations should be taken to enhance the layout of Juice Jam. The adjacent placement of this year’s stages is not reminiscent of popular music festivals like Lollapalooza and Coachella, which place their stages further apart and have several artists performing at one time.

While Juice Jam provided an array of acts to suit students’ preferences, this year’s festival should be considered a “guinea pig” experiment to build upon.

Students should appreciate UU’s ability to better gather student input.

This year, after partnering with the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment and using social media platforms to survey a wide sample of Syracuse University students, UU provided a diversity of genres and pleased a majority of the student community.

This shows that UU heavily considered student input and used campus resources to engage the student body and arrange musical acts students wanted to hear.

UU has organized artists from multiple genres throughout the year: Block Party featured Ke$ha, this year’s Juice Jam hosted Kendrick Lamar and SU will welcome Macklemore and Ryan Lewis in November.

It is both impressive and commendable that UU has brought these popular musical acts to the university, as many other colleges do not provide its students with such high-profile artists.

UU should continue bringing appealing acts to the student body while also offering music diversity, as seen with Sunday’s display of hip-hop, electronic dance music and indie-rock.

UU has a dominant presence on campus, but constant change and innovation are musts to retain student support. UU should continue to bring new and exciting musical acts and pay attention to student input.

UU proved it has potential after Sunday. Students should be eager to see what the organization will offer next.