Where Los Angeles and New York have multiple sports/entertainment arenas, Toronto gets by with the extremely busy Scotiabank Arena (though the smaller, city-owned Coca-Cola Coliseum is available).Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
If you build it, they will come. And when it comes to the concert business, they are building.
That was the takeaway from a panel discussion on the state of the live music industry at Canadian Music Week (CMW) in Toronto this week. The country’s biggest cities apparently need more arenas and amphitheatres to meet the demands of fans and promoters.
“Toronto could certainly service two venues,” said Tom Pistore, president of arena developer and operator Oak View Group, which last year announced a $280-million plan to renovate Hamilton’s FirstOntario Centre. Where Los Angeles and New York have multiple sports/entertainment arenas, Toronto gets by with the extremely busy Scotiabank Arena (though the smaller, city-owned Coca-Cola Coliseum is available).
Pistore said the overhaul of the Hamilton barn built in 1985 will make it a “world class venue” that will revitalize the Hammer’s downtown core and handle Toronto’s live music overflow: “We expect it will do for Hamilton what Staples Center did for Los Angeles,” he says, referring to what is now Crypto.com Arena.
Echoing the one-is-not-enough theme was Jeff Craib, CEO of the Feldman Agency, the high-powered entertainment talent company that opened the suburban Bowl at Sobeys Stadium this summer. “Toronto is the only city of its size that doesn’t have multiple outdoor venues,” he said, while mentioning the Greater Toronto Area’s spiralling growth projections (7.45 million people by 2031, as predicted by city officials).
The open-air Sobeys Stadium on the site of York University campus will still be used for annual National Bank Open international tennis tournament, while the newly opened Bowl’s concert configuration can accommodate 9,100 people. So far, three summer concerts – Shaggy, Barenaked Ladies and a 90s-rock event headlined by the Tea Party – are scheduled for the Bowl’s inaugural season. More shows are to be announced.
In Quebec, the multipurpose arena Place Bell in Laval opened in 2017. Home to AHL hockey team the Laval Rocket, it also serves as an extra Montreal concert venue. Sarah McLachlan plays there this month instead of Bell Centre, just 45 minutes away.
“At first it was really difficult to convince people in Montreal to come to Laval,” said panel member Nick Farkas, senior vice president, booking, concerts and events with Quebec promoter Evenko, which manages both Place Bell and Bell Centre. “Now we have a ton of shows there.”
The state of the live music – at least for big names – is more or less hunky-dory. Led by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, the industry had a record-breaking summer in 2023. Still, recent tour cancellations by the Black Keys and Jennifer Lopez raised alarm bells. Have audiences had enough of escalating ticket prices? Are too many bands touring too often? Are Lopez fans finally coming to their senses?
The other hot-button topic in the industry is the civil antitrust lawsuit brought by U.S. Department of Justice last month against Live Nation Entertainment Inc. The entertainment giant, which owns Ticketmaster and concert promoter Live Nation, is accused of monopolization and other unlawful conduct that thwarts competition.
Attorney-General Merrick Garland called on the courts to break up the company. And in an opinion piece published in Rolling Stone, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote that “Ticketmaster is in a position to squeeze everyone else in the live entertainment business – and that’s exactly what they do.”
The Ticketmaster issue was not brought up in the CMW discussion by the moderator, music journalist Karen Bliss. Which was odd, given that Patti-Anne Tarlton, executive vice-president with Ticketmaster Global, was sitting right there on the panel.
As was Debra Rathwell, executive vice-president of global touring and talent with Live Nation rival AEG Presents. At last year’s CMW, Rathwell, a New York-based Canadian dynamo who runs some of the biggest tours in the world, candidly spoke to The Globe and Mail about Live Nation without naming them: “The other company you’re talking about has tried to own all aspects of the business so that they can be in control. That control is what is wrong.”
On the same day at CMW, representatives from Toronto, Hamilton, Mississauga and Kingston participated in a symposium on music cities. A “music city,” in the parlance, is considered to be place with a thriving music economy that offers jobs, attracts tourists and delivers social and cultural benefits.
On Wednesday, it was announced that Toronto’s storied Phoenix Concert Theatre is closing its doors after 33 years. Sorbara Group, new owner of the property, plans to develop the location into residential housing. The closing is not an isolated incident. Concert venues such as the Hoxton and the Silver Dollar Room were replaced by condos in recent years. The city will help the Phoenix rise again in another location. Have they considered Oshawa?
It’s quite a paradox. So many music fans are moving to Toronto that venues are being knocked down to make room for them.