If music festivals are your thing, the summer of 2015 is shaping up to be very much a buyers’ market in Toronto.

Again. Last year didn’t leave much space on the calendar for the diligent concertgoer in this town, with jam-packed package deals pretty much non-stop from May through September — Canadian Music Week, North by Northeast, Field Trip, Boots and Hearts, Solstice 2014, the Toronto Urban Roots Festival, Riot Fest, OVO, Digital Dreams, Veld, Time, Muskoka Sound, Sandbanks New Waves, the Toronto Frosh Festival, Harvest and several Edgefest and Electric Island instalments among them — competing for attention in North America’s fourth-largest live-music market.

Yet, hot on the heels of the CBCMusic.ca Festival’s late-January announcement that it would return to Echo Beach on May 23 after a sophomore sojourn to Vancouver in 2014, the past couple of weeks have witnessed two more events with major international connections declaring their own intentions to test the fest-infested local waters.

First up was WayHome, a three-day campout affiliated with Tennessee’s beloved Bonnaroo festival, set to debut on the vast tract of land known as Burl’s Creek in Oro-Medonte outside Barrie from July 24 to 26. Not to be outdone, the U.K.-born Bestival announced mere days later that Hanlan’s Point on the Toronto Islands would be the site of its first foray into North America on June 12 and 13. Its diverse lineup, revealed Monday, spans indie, EDM, rap and world music, with names including Nas, Florence and the Machine, Caribou, SBTRKT, Flume, Clean Bandit and Omar Souleyman.

One might think organizers would be fearful of all this competition, especially since general industry wisdom holds that it takes at least three or five years for a start-up festival to hope to turn a profit — and most of the aforementioned fests are young enough to qualify as start-ups. But no, everyone seems quite willing to gamble.

“It’s kind of the Wild, Wild West right now,” opines Mike “Riot Mike” Petryshyn, who tentatively transplanted his Chicago-born Riot Fest to Toronto’s Fort York in 2012 and 2013 before staging an expensive, two-day blowout at Downsview Park last September featuring the Cure, the National, the Flaming Lips, Rise Against, Metric and Billy Talent.

“Everyone’s testing the market, I guess, coming in knowing that a lot of people live in Toronto and the surrounding cities and there’s really not that many festivals. I think even next year there will be quite a few more.”

More festivals? Really? The mind boggles. But as Petryshyn — who grew up in Buffalo but caught most of his formative gigs in Toronto while visiting family in the 905 — points out, Riot Fest started at the same time as the resurrected Lollapalooza and the inaugural Pitchfork Festival in Chicago 10 years ago, and now they’re all doing fine to the tune of 40,000 to 70,000 patrons a day while co-existing peacefully alongside more newly established events such as Spring Awakening and North Coast.

Toronto, let’s not forget, famously surpassed Chicago in population in 2013. So Petryshyn obviously wouldn’t be coming back with a fourth local Riot Fest this summer — location, dates and details of which, he says, are “in the stretch” of being finalized — if he thought he was throwing money down a bottomless hole.

Nor, for that matter, would the folks from Toronto’s Republic Live and their partners at Bonnaroo’s Knoxville-based AC Entertainment currently be putting the Burl’s Creek facility through such an extensive transformation in preparation for the first WayHome festival. As founder Shannon McNevan puts it, “for a couple of months there it looked like we were trying to build a highway.”

Republic Live has quietly grown its country-themed Boots and Hearts festival — originally staged at Peterborough’s Mosport Park in 2012 — into “Canada’s largest camping festival” over the past three years, drawing a crowd of 35,000 over the weekend last summer.

McNevan nevertheless confesses he was inspired to start the whole thing after a life-changing trip to Bonnaroo and has been pestering founder Ashley Capps to help him start a similar rock festival in southern Ontario ever since.

No one, after all, has really attempted a multi-day, rock ’n’ roll event with camping on the WayHome scale — Burl’s Creek is zoned to hold 70,000 patrons, but with its 30,000-capacity secondary amphitheatre it could conceivably hold 100,000 down the road — since the ill-fated Edenfest prematurely flamed out in a tizzy of dubious financial dealings and minor rioting at Mosport in 1996.

“We’ve wished we’d been onto this for each of the last four years. We’ve believed since the very first day we looked at the market that this was the hole, that there was a demand here,” says McNevan. “We’ve thought every year since then that somebody was gonna jump into this, somebody was gonna jump in. And then, last year — especially with the Toronto/Austin ‘music city’ partnership — we assumed something was gonna happen.”

Securing a site near Toronto capable of comfortably accommodating such a large number of campers (and their cars), as Republic Live did by purchasing Burl’s Creek through a majority shareholder last year, was key to WayHome’s birth. Lack of a venue, says McNevan, was undoubtedly “the reason nobody’s done this in this market. It’s not a small investment. There’s a scale you need for this to make sense. And if you’re doing 25,000 to 30,000 people, it doesn’t make sense.”

WayHome unveiled its preliminary lineup — topped by Grammy hero Sam Smith, Kendrick Lamar, Modest Mouse, Hozier and Alt-J — with much fanfare earlier this month, including a mysterious event at the Great Hall on Feb. 10 where some of the 350 curious attendees were rewarded with lifetime passes to the festival.

Early criticisms have focused on the fact that most of the 40-odd artists announced, with another 40 or so to come, have recently visited Toronto and/or will play other festivals this summer. But, says McNevan, that’s just part of doing business in a city that every touring artist wants to play at least once, if not twice, on a given tour cycle.

“Looking at the average tickets and sell-outs in Toronto, the market is incredible. The demand is incredible,” he says. “You don’t hear many people getting sympathy about not selling tickets in Toronto. They either didn’t do their marketing or they just weren’t that good.”

Republic Live and AC Entertainment are, thus, banking on the allure of the bacchanalian tenting experience WayHome promises to push it slightly ahead of the pack.

“We don’t feel like we’re competing with any of the other festivals. It’s going to be a stand-alone experience,” says AC Entertainment’s Capps. “I would be having second thoughts if I was coming in and trying to do something that somebody else is already doing here, but that’s not what we’re doing.”

Every festival coming into Toronto, of course, promises a “unique” experience.

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Take Bestival, founded on the Isle of Wight 12 years ago by DJ Rob Da Bank. The event has developed a reputation for such quirks as “fancy-dress” theme days, roller discos and inflatable churches offering marriages, along with its eclectic mix of electronic dance music, au courant indie-pop and unlikely “legacy” headliners like Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Duran Duran.

This penchant for theatricality has helped Bestival grow its audience steadily, from 7,000 attendees the first year to 55,000 in 2014, “in an incredibly competitive market where there are festivals every day of the week and more,” says Ben Turner, one of the fest’s directors. It has succeed by “doing things in a unique and creative way” and simply booking “what we thought was really cool, fun and different” as opposed to the same artists making the rounds of every other major festival.

“The reason we thought Toronto could work for us was we didn’t really see an event in the market that approached festivals the way we do,” says Turner. “We just thought there was a gap there and we still believe that.”

Bestival has partnered with local promoters Embrace and New York-based SFX Entertainment for the Toronto edition, with a projected capacity of 20,000 a day.

Turner stresses that organizers have spent a lot of time here over the past year or so developing relationships within the local music community and developing a proper understanding of what works and doesn’t work here. He’s aware that past branch-plant operations, such as the short-lived Virgin Fest on the Toronto Islands in 2006 and 2007, have found it difficult to coast into town on brand recognition alone.

“I think what’s been really rewarding for us is people from within our industry on a global level have all said: ‘Wow, Bestival and Toronto, that’s a really smart pairing,’” says Turner. “That’s been amazing for us to hear because I think they see that and they get it. International franchises and international shows have not always worked. . . . We feel we’re starting at the right level and coming in at the right level.”

Bestival and WayHome’s arrival in Toronto has already put at least one new southern Ontario festival on hold for 2015. Sandbanks New Waves will be back in the provincial park of the same name for its second iteration this September, but Muskoka Sound recently announced it won’t return to Huntsville until at least 2016.

“There are two big money players coming into the region and it only makes sense to step back and see what transpires,” says director Andy McLean. “Muskoka Sound was incredibly well received by musicians, fans and the community, but the only sensible business decision to make was to wait a year.”

The Toronto Urban Roots Festival, meanwhile, is uprooting from July to Sept. 18 to 20 this year, although founder Jeff Cohen of Collective Concerts says that was to avoid competition with the Pan Am Games for such basics as security, fencing, food vendors and washrooms, let alone the general attention of Toronto.

Cohen says he’s already confirmed “two high-profile headliners and a super-cool U.K. ’80s artist who hasn’t played Toronto in at least a decade” for T.U.R.F. 2015 and will divulge the full third-year lineup in mid-April. The September perch has also allowed for some artist-routing synergies with Ottawa’s City roots-music festival and “some great fests in the U.S. northeast who are booking likeminded artists,” he says. The only tough part was finding a weekend where T.U.R.F. wasn’t directly competing with another festival.

“I think the emergence of all these cool music fests is great for the city, and I hope they all do really well, though I suspect we are all gonna go through some financial hardships the first couple of years,” says Cohen. “Others, frankly, are just not gonna make it.”

Jeff Remedios of Toronto indie outpost Arts & Crafts, which will bring Field Trip back to Fort York on June 6 to 7 with Alabama Shakes and My Morning Jacket as headliners, looks at it the same way. He’s hoping his festival’s “of Toronto, for Toronto” community vibe and family-friendly approach will continue to set it apart going into Year 3.

“Certainly, there’s a breaking point. We’ll see how much is too much and, of course, we’re sensitive to everything everyone is doing. People have to make choices,” says Remedios. “But Toronto is a very fruitful, economically positive, successful concert market. Festivals overall are relatively new to North America, so we’re still trying to find our feet in terms of what the festival market looks like in Canada . . . vis à vis what the Europeans have been doing for 50 years. So some of them come and go, some of them find their feet and their voice, develop a vision and build longevity. I hope that we’re building something like that.”