Where have all the festivals gone?

For the past six years, the arrival of the Field Trip festival at Fort York on the first weekend in June has signalled the de facto beginning of the outdoor-concert season in Toronto. Not so in 2019, as the event’s creators and curators at local indie label Arts & Crafts surprised many Toronto music fans earlier this year with the announcement that Field Trip would be sitting this year out with the intention of returning in 2020 “after a little bit of time to let the grass grow back.”

This was a dismaying turn of events, since Field Trip — whose creators have declined further comment on their future plans — drew crowds last year on par with its peak 2017 outing. Over two days, crowned by boffo headlining sets from Metric and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Field Trip 2018 appeared on solid footing as essentially the last multi-day, multi-genre festival of its kind left standing in the Toronto area after the dizzying boom-and-bust that saw such big-ticket events as WayHome, Riot Fest, Bestival and the Toronto Urban Roots Festival flee the market as quickly as they stormed in en masse just a few years ago.

True, smaller-scale offerings such as Camp Wavelength, Venus Fest, Crystal Lake Sound, Electric Eclectics and the Harvest Festival abound in the margins, and the comparatively massive North by Northeast returns on June 7, but even that venerable brand was forced to beat a retreat to its club-hopping roots last year after gambling unsuccessfully on establishing itself as a ticketed weekend event in the Port Lands in 2016 and 2017.

The major players left now are genre-specific festivals such as the Toronto Jazz Festival, EDM extravaganza Veld Music Fest and the long-running country camp-out Boots & Hearts at Burl’s Creek in Oro-Medonte, while the startup Roxodus Music Fest set to debut in Clearview Township on July 11 to 14 is hoping to draw an older classic-rock demographic to cottage country with headliners like Aerosmith, Kid Rock, Nickelback and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Toronto’s dream of hatching its own omnivorous, all-things-to-all-people version of Montreal’s Osheaga, Chicago’s Lollapalooza or California’s Coachella remains just that: a dream.

“The fact that it’s the third largest music market in North America sounds encouraging to a would-be festival promoter but may actually be a main reason why festivals aren’t in as high demand here,” opines Lisa Zechmeister, director of booking and development for Republic Live, the concert-promotion outfit behind for Boots & Hearts and WayHome.

“In Toronto and across the GTA there is always something to do or an act to see: the sheer number of clubs, theatres, performing-arts centres, arenas of varying capacities and all scales of talent showing up at our doorstep, from local to internationally touring, doesn’t inspire the same motivation to see 50-plus artists all at once over three days lest you never see them again in your marketplace. Entertainment dollars are being more carefully spent and the competition is fierce …

“Rent and mortgages are expensive in the Toronto area and people have a lot of choice on where to spend their more limited leisure dollars. Even having the Raptors go this far in the playoffs will have taken money out of the live-music marketplace.”

The ambitious WayHome, which lasted three years at Burl’s Creek before being put on indefinite hiatus last summer, “is absolutely not dead and gone,” says Zechmeister, but will “make a return only at the time that the combination of talent available on the same weekend is as much of a slam dunk as we can predict without having a crystal ball.”

For the time being, Republic Live is sticking with what works, adding another country festival, Big Sky — a one-day event with a slightly more traditionalist feel than Boots & Hearts that will bring Alabama, Travis Tritt, Diamond Rio and others to Burl’s Creek on July 20 — to its calendar while also hosting the sole Canadian date by the Rolling Stones on their No Filter tour on the same grounds on June 29.

The bottom line on why so many festivals have come and gone in Toronto is their bottom lines. Launching a festival is not cheap, obviously, from a merely logistical standpoint — you have to build the stages and hire security and set up concession stands and washrooms and all that stuff — but the rise of mega-fests like Coachella and Lollapalooza has also driven the price of talent way, way up.

As former TURF (Toronto Urban Roots Fest) overseer Jeff Cohen of Collective Concerts points out, the cost of doing “non-brick-and-mortar events can be anywhere from five to six times the costs of doing a multi-band show indoors” because “the artists want double or triple their normal fees because you’re calling your event both ‘outdoors’ and a ‘multi-day’ fest.” And, of course, those artists are all being paid in U.S. dollars, which can bump those fees up another 30 or 40 per cent at current exchange rates.

“For the first two years I wasn’t paying the crazy amounts of money for artists that I’m paying now,” says Shauna de Cartier of local label Six Shooter Records, who has long dreamed of launching a festival in Toronto but has for the past eight years settled on hosting her small “boutique” fest Interstellar Rodeo each July in her hometown of Edmonton.

“But, y’know, Coachella suddenly became very successful and it’s huge business. Huge, huge business. And it sets a bar. They’ll pay anything for talent because they have to have that in place and they make their money in all kinds of ways, but then that becomes a benchmark and then you’ll start seeing offers for Band X in the $50,000 to $75,000 range on a band that in the market might only be able to gross, like, $10,000.”

Factor in that it usually takes a new festival four or five years, at least, to start breaking even and/or making money and one can see why so many have pulled up stakes.

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“Unfortunately, with the festival model, trial-and-error is how you figure stuff out and a lot of people can’t sustain after the first few errors,” says Nick Farkas, a Toronto expat who now works in Montreal for concert-promotion outfit Evenko, the force behind multi-day fests Osheaga, Heavy MTL and IleSoniq.

“The festival business is not for the faint of heart, and if you get rain or if you get an artist who didn’t sell that extra 2,000 or 3,000 tickets, your margins are tough and it’s hard to continue doing something three or four years in if it’s not making money. You really have to say, ‘We’re getting there’ or at some point you’re gonna cut your losses and walk away. And we’re seeing that more and more and more. It’s not just Toronto.”

It took the 13-year-old Osheaga three or four years to break even, five years for there to be “light at the end of the tunnel” financially, he says. And not everyone has deep enough pockets or the stomach to throw hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars away on an uncertain future in a highly fickle business.

Up on the Dufferin Highlands, construction-magnate-turned-concert-promoter Mike Dunphy is confident he’s hit on a winning formula with Roxodus Music Fest.

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He and his partner, Fab Loranger — who also hails from the world of “big construction” — are overseeing the transformation of the area around the Edenvale Aerodrome into a 770-acre concert-and-camping space comparable to Burl’s Creek. It could legally hold 200,000 people, but he’s “scaled back” to a capacity of 40,000 for the inaugural Roxodus, for which the pair have brought in the same production director employed by Coachella and Desert Trip.

The festival has already sold 20,000 four-day passes, sold out all 1,346 of its powered camping spots and 75 per cent of its non-powered ones, and the single-day tickets are starting to move, says Dunphy, who has some experience running large events as the man behind the 75,000-strong Wasaga Beach Motorcycle Rally. He has no qualms about going all-in on a new festival and he plans to stick with it until it works.

“Everything’s all bought and paid for. The bands are all bought and paid for, the land’s all bought and paid for, all our production’s all bought and paid for,” he says. “We love hearing the critics say, ‘What makes you think you’re gonna do it better?’ It’s like anything. Why did Apple succeed? Why did Amazon succeed when all these others didn’t? You’ve gotta have a plan and hopefully that recipe that you put together is the magic formula … But the thing is, you have to know going in that it’s a long-term plan.”

An encouraging outgrowth of Roxodus’s investment in the sprawling new event space, he adds, is that “some really big festivals that have been around a long time and that make a lot of money” in the States have quietly approached him and his partner about using the grounds. Which raises the possibility that another imported brand or two akin to the Chicago-based Riot Fest or the U.K.’s Bestival might be looking to dip their feet in the Toronto market again.

One person who won’t have anything to do with that is expat-Torontonian promoter Elliott Lefko, who now works for Goldenvoice in Los Angeles and has underwritten numerous festival dead ends in our city.

“I got an email recently from Goldfinger’s Darrin Pfeiffer, who said he had an idea. I replied, ‘As long as it’s not about a festival,’” he says. “I hate festivals. I’ve kept trying every year for the last 15 years and they never work. Edgefest, Riot Fest, Virgin Fest, Grove Fest. I’ve tried big names, themes, low tickets. Nothing has worked. It’s like there’s some puppet master laughing at my feeble efforts.

“The costs are too high, it’s way too risky and there’s never enough people paying to make it worthwhile. But when that ray of sunshine comes through and a great band is onstage, and you’re surrounded by an excellent staff, you get excited and you want to give it one more try. I guess I would like to ask you, is there a 12-step program for festival promoters?”