Five bands from the USF community will compete tonight outside the Marshall Student Center for a chance to play as a part of USF’s Bullstock line-up on April 12.

Campus Activities Board Special Event Director, Haley Radeka, a senior majoring in mass communications, said because of the extra stage at this year’s Bullstock, there will be two winners instead of one.

Two of the five bands competing, the judges’ pick and the crowd’s pick — voted on by text, will be given slots at the highly-anticipated event to perform alongside Owl City, Hot Chelle Rae and the All-American Rejects.

The five finalists selected for the battle — Variance, Fight Another Day, Hyborn, South of Holly and The Music Box — were chosen after a committee from CAB listened to CDs dropped off by interested bands.

Some of the performing bands have participated in the event before. South of Holly submitted work to Battle of the Bands last year and made it as a reserve if the winners was unable to play. Other bands, such as Hyborn and The Music Box, found out about the event while on campus.

“I just happened to catch a glimpse at the sign that they had out front by the Marshall Student Center and so I was like ‘Oh, well that should be kinda cool,” Nicholas Marciano, one of the guitarists of The Music Box and a mathematics major, said. “Then I saw that they said the winner was going to partake in Bullstock, so I was like that would be amazing.”

The bands performing will have 15 minutes on stage to impress the judges and audience with their sound, roughly half the time of typical set. Instead of having time to play a wide assortment of songs each band will be limited to three or four songs.

“We’ve been playing a lot of shows recently, so we’ve already been practicing a lot,” Creighton said. “But for this particular performance we have such a short amount of time to play in and we’ll only be able to play at most three songs. Instead of running through the songs in order to make them tighter, I feel like we’re going to have to try to focus more on performance since we’ll have such a brief period to shine. There’s more pressure on us to perform well in a short amount of time.”

Because the bands are local, some of them are familiar with each other’s music, and are even looking forward to a little friendly competition.

“We just want to have a good time with it,” Marciano said. “We want to take ourselves seriously, but we don’t want it to affect the overall event.”

The event is free and open to everyone.

“It’s going to be really cool and there’s some good bands playing and it’s for a great prize,” Creighton said. “It’s not often that bands get to play out there and it’s a great spot.”

Additional reporting by
Emily Herr.