Toronto’s summer music festival feast has come to an end
A market deluged with events in recent years is slowing as some annual festivals retrench
The gold rush is over.
No, the Toronto live-music fan isn’t exactly hard up for festivals to attend this coming summer — the silly season will, in fact, kick off in the days ahead with the return of the CBC Music Festival to Echo Beach on May 27, Field Trip to Fort York on June 3 and 4 and North by Northeast to the Port Lands on June 23 to 25 — but there are definite signs the optimism that led numerous high-profile events to flood the local concert market just a few years ago is waning.
U.K. import Bestival announced earlier this month it was pulling up stakes and leaving town after just two years of trying to make it work here, first on the Toronto Islands and last year in Woodbine Park, citing the loss of its North American promotion part- ner, the bankrupt SFX Entertainment, as the reason for its sudden departure.
Chicago-born Riot Fest abandoned ship last year, just two summers after it upsized to Downsview Park from its original 2012 point of entry at Fort York.
The Toronto Urban Roots Festival has yet to announce whether it will be returning to Fort York for a fifth iteration this summer.
And it doesn’t take an in-depth knowledge of the music business to surmise that the lineup for the third WayHome festival is likely the result of someone at the top decreeing it was time to trim the talent budget, or that the fest’s decision to freeze ticket prices at the “Tier 1” level until just recently was probably the result of a consequent dip in early sales.
This year, WayHome will see Imagine Dragons, Flume and Frank Ocean inheriting the marquee from the rather more high-wattage likes of Neil Young, Arcade Fire, Kendrick Lamar and LCD Soundsystem in previous years.
It can take years for a festival to establish itself to the point that it becomes profitable and, while Toronto is North America’s third-largest concert market, it could be that our city isn’t quite the festival cash cow some thought it was. Or, perhaps, everybody just went in too big, too soon. “I think my comment would be — and that includes a self-criticism of TURF or whatever — that a lot of us always have big visions and we think we have to be like our American counterparts but I think that maybe, perhaps, starting a little smaller and selling out and making these things organically build would have been the better route,” offers TURF founder Jeff Cohen of Collective Concerts.
“I think if somebody does a oneday, outdoor event and it goes well, that would give them reason to say: ‘OK, maybe we could do two now. Maybe we can introduce camping. Maybe we can switch things up.’ But I think this whole idea of having to make it multi-day and multi-stage and making these things huge, you’re just multiplying your loss until you’ve actually got it right, where you have an audience that’s actually committing every year because they think it’s such an amazing amount of fun.”
Cohen, who is candid that TURF lost hundreds of thousands of dollars during its first four years, hasn’t ruled out bringing the festival back this summer, but he vows it will be a smaller affair — not necessarily a three-day event, nor necessarily tied to the same mid-September weekend it has called home since 2015. Indeed, he’s open to “all creative ideas” and invites anyone with “a great idea for September that they’ve been thinking of” to email him if they want to collaborate.
“We sort of wanted to see what everybody else booked and how their ticket sales were before we committed to anything. So we just decided, since we’re at the very end (of the season), we don’t really have to make up our minds,” shrugs Cohen.
“We’ve put feelers out to a whole bunch of bands, and then we put feelers out to a bunch of other events in town saying: ‘Do you want to do something together, maybe? It doesn’t have to be on that weekend.’ So we’re kinda waiting to see if something clicks — right bands, right everything.
“We got two major grants and we’ve told them we’re looking, but if we don’t, at the end of the day we’ll just give the grant money back and sit it out for a year.”
Making things more difficult for Canadian promoters hoping to get a festival off the ground are the high prices being paid for talent by much larger and better established events — flush with corporate-sponsorship dollars — in the U.S. and Europe. Those prices are exacerbated at the moment by the low Canadian dollar.
As WayHome creative director Ryan Howes notes, talent budgets have been about 30-per-cent higher than they used to be for the past three years “and that does put a dent in the bottom line, for sure.”
That said, Howes reports that both WayHome — which happens July 28 to 30 on the Burl’s Creek event grounds in Oro-Medonte — and its countrified sister festival, Boots & Hearts (Aug. 10-13 in the same venue), are doing “very well” in 2017, albeit with some minor adjustments to fit the current realities of the market.
WayHome, for instance, has downplayed its rock roots a little this year and boosted the EDM and hip-hop presence on the bill to sate a local demand evident from the continued success of the events such as the annual, dance-centric Veld Music Festival in Downsview Park, while for the first time in its six-year history, Boots & Hearts is offering single-day tickets “because we’re realizing that not everyone can commit to that four- to five-day camping-festival experience.”
Therein lies another challenge in mounting a festival in the Toronto area: Torontonians have a lot to do.
“Toronto is simply a very competitive market for entertainment dollars, with many options in music, theatre, dance, sport, etc.,” emails Rob Zifarelli, a Toronto-based agent who heads up the United Talent Agency’s North American festival department. “So when there are multiple multi-day music festivals to choose from, rarely do many people go to more than one. Therefore that dilutes the potential audience even further. Take into account options that surround Toronto and it’s obvious they all can’t be successful.
“Toronto also gets the opportunity to see every artist at some point during a record cycle as EVERYONE stops here. No other Canadian city can claim that.”
Zifarelli also observes that Toronto-area festivals must compete with other events from outside the GTA and across the border who now advertise here, a point echoed by Field Trip overseer Aaron Miller.
The family-friendly Field Trip, now in its fifth year, is affiliated with local indie label Arts & Crafts so it has no problem securing high-profile inhouse talent like this year’s headliners, Broken Social Scene and Feist, to sell a few extra tickets each summer. Other fests, however, don’t have that luxury.
“I do think one of the things that gets overlooked sometimes is that our competition isn’t always necessarily just the festivals in the city of Toronto, but the festivals around the world or in the region or even across the border where we’re competing with them for talent,” Miller says. “There are festivals overseas that are happening in the U.K. or Europe the same weekend as ours, and bands are only going to be in Europe or they’re going to be in North America and, in some ways, the global demand for talent is as much a challenge as any of the sort of in-market competitive properties.
“We have our niche, we have our crowd, we have that history, so I think our place in the market feels nice this year. But obviously it’s still a difficult market and a lot of the challenges that we face are coming from beyond the GTA.”
North by Northeast founder Michael Hollett, who last year dispensed with the club-crawl model NXNE had observed for more than two decades to resurrect it as a twoday standalone event on a disused swath of the Toronto port lands, also has faith that the local market can still sustain a wide variety of festivals.
This year, NXNE — touting headliners Post Malone, Tyler the Creator and Passion Pit — features midway rides and games and a comedy tent, and will add a Sunday program, so he’s putting his money where his mouth is.
“I don’t even think we had a target, you know? We did OK. We definitely did OK. We had a good turnout,” Hollett says of last year’s experiment in change. “That was a huge new thing to introduce to North by Northeast. That was a very dramatic change, but I felt good about what happened in the first year. And, as you can see, I expanded it, so that says something.
“I think people love going to music festivals, and I think we all know that. They’re selective, which is fair enough — they value their ‘spend’ and we have to give them value for their money. But look, Coachella sells out in a blink.
“People want to go to festivals. They just want to go to the right one, I guess.”