The Toronto “festival boom” of summers past wasn’t a total bust, but it was definitely a blip.

Field Trip will be returning to Fort York on June 2 and 3 and on Tuesday unveiled an impressive lineup topped by Metric, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bahamas, Alvvays and Japandroids, while EDM extravaganza the Veld Music Festival marks its seventh year at Downsview Park on Aug. 4 and 5 with beats (and some rhymes) supplied by the likes of DJ Snake, Marshmello, Martin Garrix and Migos.

Of all the other major, multi-day music events that were crowding the Toronto-area concert calendar just two or three years ago, however, conspicuously few remain. Riot Fest — whose founder, Chicago punk Mike “Riot Mike” Petryshyn, proclaimed Toronto “the Wild, Wild West” of festival markets to the Star in 2015 — is now long gone. The Toronto Urban Roots Festival, the U.K.-born Bestival and the Time Festival quietly admitted defeat and pulled out of the market last year, too.

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The big-budget campout WayHome, meanwhile, announced last September that it would be taking 2018 off after a disappointing third go-round at Burl’s Creek the previous July. And even the long-lived North by Northeast fest is in damage-control mode this year, moving back into the clubs and offering three days of free shows at Yonge-Dundas Square from June 15-17 after a rather ill-fated attempt to rebrand itself as a ticketed festival in the Port Lands for the past two summers.

That doesn’t mean Toronto and the surrounding area is done with festivals, of course. (Beyond rock and EDM, the giant country fest Boots and Hearts returns to Burl’s Creek in August for its seventh year.) But people are definitely thinking smaller these days.

“Back to basics” is the way Ryan Howes puts it. Even before he pulled out of his job as WayHome’s creative director shortly before the festival’s collapse last year, the live-music veteran was intimating that smaller, more audience-specific events rather than giant catch-all shows were the way of the future.

Now, with his coyly named Lower Level Entertainment company up and running, he’s plotting a series of single-day mini-fests at Raspberry Farm in the Royal Botanical Gardens outside Hamilton, one of which — a day-long celebration of the Royal Mountain Records roster featuring Mac DeMarco, U.S. Girls, TUNS and Calpurnia (a.k.a. the band featuring Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things) set for Sept. 2 — has already been announced.

“It’s very scaled-down and it’s back-to-basics,” says Howes, who looked back to his days working as site manager for shows by the likes of Radiohead, Pearl Jam and the Beastie Boys at the late Molson Park two decades ago for inspiration.

“In Toronto, it’s a tougher market for ticket buyers to commit to multi-day festivals and events when there’s so many events happening in this market (and) a lot of the ticket buyers also have summer lives up in cottage country and other vacation spots, so when you have all those options it’s really hard to commit to multi-day, two- to four-day festivals.”

Tickets for Royal Mountain at Raspberry Farm are priced at $52.50, in contrast to the $150-$200 range (and up) typically observed by multi-day festivals these days. Howes has set his moderate attendance goals of 5,000 to 7,000 and scaled down the stage setup “to make the performances really intimate and to ensure that all ticket buyers have a great view of the stage.” Headliners will perform at sunset, leaving plenty of escape time for those who want to get a jump on the hordes for the 35-minute ride back to Toronto or the 10 minutes to downtown Hamilton.

Howes has also dispensed with the “VIP” tickets so common to present-day festivals, meaning everyone gets to enjoy the fancy foodstuffs by chef Anthony Rose to be offered up on site, not just people who paid an extra $100 for the privilege.

“Those Molson Park shows had a really fair ticket price and everyone had the same experience and everyone showed up expecting the same experience and everyone left really happy and feeling like they got their money’s worth,” says Howes. “And that’s really the goal that I want at this new outdoor space with these shows this summer, that everyone leaves with the same experience and wants to come back for more, even in 2019.

“The space is absolutely beautiful. The first time I saw it I was blown away, and I can honestly say I’ve never seen a venue like this or a location like this for live music anywhere in Canada.”

Howes isn’t the only one downsizing his ambitions. Jeff Cohen of Collective Concerts, who spent four years trying to get the Toronto Urban Roots Festival off the ground, is dipping his toes back in the outdoor-concert market with a one-day event at Fort York on Aug. 4 headlined by the National and featuring festival-level support by Father John Misty, Julien Baker, Jenny Lewis and Dan Edmonds. But that’s as close to a festival as Cohen is ever willing to go again.

“Artistically, TURF was really nice, but it’ll take years of therapy to get over it,” he quips, breathing a sigh of relief that the National gig is “selling like hotcakes.”

Cohen thought it a natural move to mount a multi-day festival after doing successful one-offs by such acts as the Arcade Fire and Death Cab for Cutie on Toronto Islands, but quickly realized there might be a reason why Toronto “doesn’t have a long history of summer outdoor shows.” There’s just too much going on, all the time, and too many quality indoor venues “from the Drake on up to the Air Canada Centre” to compete with. Toronto is a victim of its own musical wealth, he reasons, which might explain why we have yet to establish an annual event on the scale of the Ottawa Bluesfest or the Edmonton Folk Festival here.

“If you’re living in Ottawa or Edmonton or Coachella or the middle of Tennessee, you don’t get any bands year-round, or it’s few and far between. So someone starts a festival and you’re seeing all the things you wanted to see. But in Toronto? They’ve already been here twice,” says Cohen. “Lollapalooza is an exception in Chicago and there’s probably an exception in Atlanta or somewhere, but the gist of it is that smaller markets do much better with these events because they are really unique to that area where they’re happening. In Toronto, it’s not a big deal … It’s possible to do it here, but no one’s found the secret sauce yet.”

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Field Trip has come as close as any Toronto festival has come to finding that “secret sauce.” Its fifth outing last June, headlined by hometown heroes Broken Social Scene and Feist and Paris’s Phoenix, was “without a doubt our most successful yet” and pulled in more than 15,000 concertgoers over the weekend, according to programmer Aaron Miller.

Field Trip, though, has succeeded by keeping itself modestly sized — ticket sales cap at 10,000 per day and the talent budget is restrained enough to make that possible — and honing in on a niche market of downtown-Toronto indie-pop fans. The festival’s overseers at the Arts & Crafts label, which initially mounted the event as a one-day 10th-anniversary party in 2013, have been content to let it grow at its own pace.

“We just try to have a really clear sense of what our goals are and what our target is in terms of the kind of program we’re trying to put together and who we’re trying to reach, and as long as you have that, I think, you’re in good shape,” says Miller. “We’re trying to celebrate the city and diversity and all these different, cross-generational voices in music and all these things that we kinda harp on year after year are starting to sort of sink in. It’s a lot of touchy-feely stuff, but I think it is what makes this particular festival property unique and able to connect with a smaller audience, maybe, but an audience that we can sustain.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that this year’s Field Trip festival will be held on June 3-4. The correct dates are June 2-3.