Sunday, March 8, 2026

After nearly six years without ticketed concerts, SCOPE Productions successfully brought paid live music back to campus on March 4 with a hometown performance from indie artist Dan English at Gabe’s.

Organized in collaboration with KRUI, the event marked the first ticketed show hosted by SCOPE since 2019. With 95 tickets sold to the public, the Wednesday night concert drew a crowd of students, community members, and longtime supporters eager to see English return to the Iowa City area. The night also featured opening performances from local artists Birdlabs and Lex Leto.

Earlier in the day, English and his band performed a live studio session at KRUI as part of the station's Big Room series, a performance format comparable to NPR’s Tiny Desk series. The 20-minute set was broadcast live on air and streamed to YouTube, followed by a 15-minute on-air interview with a KRUI reporter. After packing up their equipment, the band headed to Gabe’s to load in and prepare for the evening performance. The quick turnaround created a full day of programming built around English’s return to Iowa City.

For the students helping run the event, the day required balancing the demands of both a studio recording environment and a live concert venue. Sam Smith, one of SCOPE’s production director, helped operate the soundboard for the KRUI session before transitioning to help prepare for the Gabe’s show later that evening.

“Recording in the studio is much more difficult than mixing live on stage,” Smith said. “You don’t have the room noise to help you out. Everything is being recorded and listened to on speakers or headphones somewhere else, leading to a much higher precision sound. It’s a lot easier to hear things that sound out of place, which means you have to clean up the mix a lot more.”

The tight timeline meant production staff had to move quickly between locations. Smith said he actually left the station before the Big Room set had fully wrapped in order to prepare for the evening concert.

“It was a pretty tight turnaround,” he said. “I actually left the station before their set was already over and my boy Isaak [Thompson] took over the soundboard for the last song, just so I could catch the bus in time to get home and grab all the gear to bring to Gabe’s.”

Despite the logistical rush, the moment also provided a memorable milestone for the student production team.

“It was especially cool getting to listen to the radio on my phone when I was leaving early for Gabe’s,” Smith said. “I had already left the building but I was still getting to listen to my mix on the actual radio. It felt official.”

For English, who grew up in nearby West Branch, Iowa, and is now based in New York, the performance felt like a homecoming. Performing in front of friends, family, and longtime supporters added an extra layer of emotion to the night.

“Just hope to make everybody proud,” English said in an interview conducted prior to the Iowa City performance, admitting that playing for familiar faces can be “nerve-racking.”

The event also represented a milestone for SCOPE, which had not hosted a ticketed concert since before the COVID-19 pandemic. According to SCOPE General Manager Ida-Marie Bonkafo-Efofa, a senior at the University of Iowa, bringing ticketed shows back had been a goal for several years. Much of the infrastructure that previously supported these events — including a ticketing system and campus box office — no longer exists. As a result, students had to rebuild the process themselves while learning how to budget and manage a paid live event.

“Ticketed shows had been something that SCOPE had talked about bringing back since I was a freshman,” Bonkafo-Efofa said. “In my last year I wanted to make sure we could do it.” She added that establishing a working model for ticketed concerts was important not just for the event itself but also for future student leaders.

Despite a relatively short promotional window of about two weeks, the show saw a strong turnout. The familiarity of the local venue, Gabe’s, also helped attract a broader audience. Many attendees learned about the concert through word of mouth and on-campus promotion led by the SCOPE Marketing and Content committee.

Bonkafo-Efofa credited the organization’s student leaders for quickly mobilizing to promote the concert. She highlighted the work of SCOPE directors — Digital Media Director Aspen Suthers, Graphic Design Director Laisha Medina, and AMPLIFY Editor-in-Chief Lucy Prescott — along with Marketing Director Simon Osako, Digital Marketing Director Camryn Ward, and Community Outreach Director Malina Amjadi.

The collaboration between SCOPE and KRUI played a major role in bringing the event together. KRUI helped manage ticketing through the organization’s existing system and contributed technical expertise and production support. Izaak Thompson, KRUI's chief engineer, is a longtime friend of the artist, and the station’s general manager, Evan Raefield, had been a fan of English’s album Sky Record. Because of that familiarity, both organizations saw the opportunity to bring him back to the Iowa City area.

“When we collaborate with KRUI, we love bringing in artists they already know,” Bonkafo-Efofa said. “As an alternative radio station, they’re always listening to artists with exciting new sounds or artists who are about to break through.”

Seeing the turnout at Gabe’s made SCOPE optimistic about the future of ticketed programming. Bonkafo-Efofa said she hopes the experience encourages future student leaders to incorporate ticketed concerts earlier into SCOPE’s programming calendar.

As students packed into Gabe’s on a Wednesday night, the event served as both a celebration of live music’s return and a promising sign of what future student-run concerts could look like. Readers can also explore the photo gallery below, captured by SCOPE’s photographers, for a closer look at the night’s performances and crowd.