Look who made the jump to the Air Canada Centre
A hot market, an aggressive venue and more help push some surprising performers, from Kygo to Nick Cave, into arena
There are just three concerts booked at the Air Canada Centre this month, and two of them might take you by surprise.
Obviously, the encore presentation of Bon Jovi’s This House is Not for Sale tour scheduled to drop down in the rink on May 12 is not one of those shows. Eighties pop-metal holdout Jon Bon Jovi and his fellow Jersey boys are so ridiculously popular in Toronto that they were chosen as the first inductees into something then known as the Air Canada Centre Hall of Fame in November 2013.
Norwegian EDM floor-filler Kygo tonight on Wednesday, May 2, and American rapper Russ on May 29, though, seem like rather ambitious arena-level bookings even to someone like me, who’s made music his business for a couple of decades. So what gives? Is the music industry so desperate for new big-room stars to compensate for what it no longer makes in record sales that it’s pushing its most promising newbies up the ladder before they have a chance to get ready?
Is Toronto, the third-largest live-music market in North America, really such a hot town for concerts that a Kygo or a Russ can make the leap to the ACC without fear so quickly? Or is there just nowhere else to play in this town?
Turns out all of the above apply. Toronto is a super-hot concert market, for one thing, so you can actually take a gamble on an arena show that hasn’t done terribly well in other markets — Lorde’s recent Melodrama tour, for instance, or last year’s surprisingly tough-tosell Infinite Content road swing by the Arcade Fire — and still sell out the ACC here, sometimes even for a couple of nights. And, yes, the contemporary music business is hell-bent on making instant superstars of whatever stars it has at its disposal. That’s the name of the game these days, and the players who want to play are willing to play.
“I’m definitely going all in,” says Kyrre Gorvell-Dahll, a.k.a. Kygo, who brings his Kids in Love Tour with Gryffin, Blackbear and Seeb to the ACC tonight. “That’s my goal now, just to see how far we can take this ... It’s definitely very crazy and this tour is definitely the biggest one I’ve ever done, but it feels amazing when I show up to sound check and I realize how big the venues I’m playing are.”
If the Air Canada Centre seems, at first blush, an odd place to plant a chap like Kygo — whose pop-savvy, hands-inthe-air sound is, admittedly, built for festival crowds in the tens of thousands — when he passes through Toronto at first, it doesn’t so much when one takes a moment to consider the alternatives. There really are no alternatives.
Once you’ve graduated from the clubs to bigger rooms in this town like Massey Hall (capacity 2,750), the Sony Centre (3,200) or Rebel (3,700), there’s really nowhere else to go but the 16,000-cap Budweiser Stage or the ACC, which can handle about 20,000 people at full speed. Echo Beach can handle 5,000 or 6,000, maybe, but no one’s gonna book an outdoor show in Toronto in February. Although even that might be preferable to some than such alternatives as cruising out to the suburbs to watch their favourite band playing such windswept suburban venues as the Hershey Centre or the Powerade Centre.
“Part of the problem is the city that we live in and what’s available to us,” says Amy Hersenhoren of Collective Concerts, a local indie-promotion outfit that has staged shows by Alabama Shakes, the National and the Postal Service at the ACC in the past. “Toronto is actually known right now throughout, like, the ‘agent community’ as having a venue problem.
“After the National sold 5,000 or 5,600 tickets in Toronto, what was the next step? You need a venue that’s at least 6,000. Echo Beach? What if they come in January or November? My busiest month this spring was April. We weren’t doing anything outside in April this year. People would have died. And then October and No- vember are my busy months in the fall, and that’s usually past anyone wanting to stay out late outside, in terms of temperature, right?”
The Air Canada Centre — due to be renamed the Scotiabank Arena and confuse the public unnecessarily on July 1 — is happy to fill that “big void,” as Wayne Zronik, senior vicepresident of music and live entertainment for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which owns the venue.
The space is adaptable to crowds between 4,000 and 20,000, and not accidentally so.
“The paradigm of how musicians make their money has been flipped on its head,” Zronik says.
“It used to be you toured to sell records, now you make records to sell tours. Our volume has increased dramatically. When we look at ourselves five or 10 years ago, we were at 30 shows a year. This year, we’re looking at between 70 and 80. Which is incredible.”
MLSE has a vested interest in funnelling acts towards the ACC — “Our motto is ‘no dark nights,’ ” Zronik says — and often silently partners with uberpromotion company Live Nation on some of the tours it brings to Ontario in hopes of eventually making that happen.
It’s smart business, really, considering that Zronik says on a given night when there are shows at the ACC, the Budweiser Stage, the Rogers Centre and the myriad other venues around Toronto, more money is being spent here on concert tickets “than will be spent in some medium-sized North American markets in one year.”
“We wouldn’t be doing our job if we sat around waiting for someone to call us to rent the building. We’re out there trying to find those events that will resonate with the community,” Zronik says. “Most artists aren’t going to skip our market. It’s just such a major market. But as they’re planning their tour, it’s convincing them that, hey, if you think you can do one clean in Toronto, you can probably do two … Agents and managers have a tendency to underestimate our market, so we’re always pushing for those extra shows.
“We did Romeo Santos this year. We haven’t had a huge amount of Latin music in Toronto and there were some people who didn’t believe it would be a success, but we had a near sellout here and it was a Latin dance party going down. So now there will probably be a lot more Latin music here because we’ve demonstrated that it can be done.”
Expat Torontonian Elliott Lefko, now vice-president of the promotion company Golden Voice in Los Angeles, has taken a chance on booking Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 35 years into their career, into the ACC on Oct. 28 this year.
In this case, he says, Cave — who played Massey Hall just last year — has proven himself by selling out arenas in Australia and New Zealand and Europe and “got to that level, so his manager wanted to try something like that in North America.” If you do it right, you can come back, but the gamble isn’t necessarily just a financial one.
“If you don’t do it right, if you make a mistake, you take a huge loss because of the costs at the ACC,” Lefko says. “Just the stage hands are, like, $40,000 or something, as opposed to $2,000 at a club … if you don’t sell a ton of tickets, you’re really gonna get killed. So as a promoter, you’re kind of nervous about trying to do something like that.
“And then when people want to go and do it, how does the act project? Say they can sell the tickets, how do they project? How do they bring the show there that will sell it to the last seats and make it larger than life, because if you’re going to go in an arena, you’ve really got to do something big. Forgetting even the lights and the sound and all that kind of stuff, you need someone like Nick Cave who’s going to get onstage and become larger than life and can project.
“He can handle an arena. But some of these other guys? I saw Russ at the Life is Beautiful festival and he just stands there. So with somebody like that, yeah, he can sell 7,000 tickets, but how is he going to project in a big place like that?”