A San José State student club, Up & Up, keeps coming up on top after winning a live concert for the school.
The two-day competition was different colleges trying to get the most presale tickets, according to the club web page.
The five colleges with the most presale tickets each win a concert for their school which happens to be a Matroda concert this year.
Matroda is a Croatian electronic dance music (EDM) artist according to a web page from Insomniac Records.
He is also a producer who placed 29 in the Top 101 producers in 2021, which can be seen on 1001 Tracklists’s web page.
For the club to win the contest, they had to encourage students to buy presale tickets for the concert.
Up & Up club president, Suhani Kakaria, is pleased to see all of the club’s hard work paid off.
“I think it was a great moment for all of us,” Kakaria said. “This semester has been pretty hard but that moment showed us that it finally worked and we got what we wanted.”
She said she is the president of a club that brings students together with music, whether that be putting on concerts for students through crowdsourcing ticket sales.
Kakaria attributes the early struggles to having a completely different executive board from last semester and says that it felt like they had to rebuild the club from the ground up.
Luckily, she had help from club chairman Kasey Koehler who was excited to find out that Up & Up won the concert.
“We were competing against 80 different schools and we are a small community school,” Koehler said. “So it was a huge win for us.”
Koehler performed at an event in September, before the presale competition started.
Students from the club showcased their DJ abilities and club ambassadors encouraged people to buy presale tickets at After Hours, a live music venue in downtown San Jose.
“We basically threw a party for our presale event,” Koehler said. “I think that might have pushed us over the edge a little bit because it was a huge turnout.”
Kakaria said that another factor in their win was the fact that they focused more on social media engagement this semester.
“We were posting nonstop,” Kakaria said. “I think social media was one the biggest reasons why we won because we were posting so much.”
The social media chairs of the club would post on Instagram and Twitter on a regular basis to get people to pay attention to the competition.
The club’s members were not the only winners in all of this. Alondra Campos, a third-year business administration and management information systems student, won VIP tickets to meet Matroda in a giveaway contest.
“I was honestly really shocked (because) I have never won any type of giveaway so I was super excited,” Campos said. “I have never met any one well-known in any industry.”
Campos is a fan of Matroda but her first experience at his set was not what she had hoped for.
“I had gone to Hard Summer and I had gone to see him but it was extremely crowded and hot (so) I could not fully enjoy it,” Campos said. “I am excited to see him again and get a redo from the last time I saw him.”
Like Kakaria and Koehler, Campos had some good things to say about the Up & Up club and the role they play at SJSU.
“It is a nice sense of community on campus that brings students together who all like EDM,” Campos said. “I’m glad there are clubs like (this) on campus.”
Kakaria also shares the same sentiment of the communal aspect that this club has.
“It comes down to the team that we have (and) we have a huge team,” Kakaria said. “Every person matters and I think that everyone worked really hard and it paid off. ”
With a group of 40 people in the club, it takes more than just the executive board to achieve a win like this.
“Teamwork is what made us win (and) every little thing helps,” Koehler said. “We have videographers, people who take photos, people who do content creation and every single section of our organization counts.”
Up & Up plans to hold the Matroda concert at the Guildhouse, a downtown gaming bar, on November 14.
