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Toronto events and festivals

Toronto Welsh Male Voice Choir Concert with guest soloist Kelly Sloan
Sunday, December 2nd at 2:00 PM
Martin Luther Evangelical Lutheran Church, 2379 Lake Shore Blvd West, Toronto, ON, M8V 1B7
Purchase tickets at: https://tinyurl.com/20181002Concert
This event is to help raise $50,000 to sponsor the Kifle Refugee Family: To escape human rights abuses, Salina and Goitom Kifle and their four children in 2017 fled Eritrea on foot to an Ethiopian refugee camp, where they were given UN refugee status.
The Toronto Welsh Male Voice Choir has performed in Wales and throughout North America including Carnegie Hall. Visit www.welshchoir.ca to hear them sing.
Come early to our church's German Christmas Bazaar from 12 to 4pm featuring: homemade baking, handcrafted gifts, hot waffles, european sausages, and spiced punch.
Concert flyer.JPG
 
I'm especially stoked about the German Christmas tie-in.

Sausages and spiced anything? Sold!
 
Interesting approach that Roxodus is making- creating a permanent events space to avoid the infrastructural and logistics costs of temporary festival grounds, the same way Coachella has its own festival grounds.

I wonder if this might be a approach that could be taken with Ontario Place- continuing the trend started by Echo Beach? That being said, I wonder what other unspoken causes might be behind the lack of big festivals in Toronto?

Big music fests avoid Toronto as financial risk grows too high
BEN RAYNER JUNE 04, 2019

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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.

“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.”
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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.

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.”
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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.
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www.thestar.com

Big music fests avoid Toronto as financial risk grows too high

Performers want more money thanks to Coachella, but Torontonians have lots of entertainment options.
www.thestar.com www.thestar.com
 
jje1000 said:
Well scratch that, looks like Roxodus's also a disaster as well!

https://twitter.com/x/status/1146392387549372416
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Like these 2 construction guys who somehow thought they were capable of running a music festival, there are too many fly by night promoters in this city.

There is also a lack of venues of appropriate size and convenient location in the city which leads people to view any empty field in the GTA as a 'great place for a festival!'.
 
This clown show is still scheduled to take place August 23-25 in a field somewhere in Vaughan although with just 7 weeks to go they still haven't announced a lineup. Only $55!

nowtoronto.com

Journey Festival will be Canada's first legal cannabis music festival - NOW Magazine

Taking place at Boyd Conservation Park in Vaughan this August, the event will combine bands and cannabis culture, within the limits of the law
nowtoronto.com nowtoronto.com

They announced it in mid-May with no lineup because top bands don't book festival dates a year or more in advance, you just call them Thursday night!

Journey Cannabis & Music Festival – Journey Cannabis & Music Festival

journeyfestival.ca journeyfestival.ca
 
ShonTron said:
And don't discount the appeal of bouncy castles and flat rides to kids. They're easy to set up (especially important under streetcar wires). If they get the parents out too, they're likely to spend money.

I'd love to see some more variety - Hamilton's art crawls are neat, and Supercrawl is huge. There are some missed opportunities at some of the BIA street festivals for more unique offerings and art displays and performances.
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I'm not discounting bouncy castles - they're an integral part of every festival where children are present. What I take issue with is that these alleged street 'festivals' think that by simply including a bouncy, a crap band(s) and/or ethnic dance group(s), overpriced food and a guarded drinking prison - then they have fulfilled the requisite minimum requirements and... that's it that's all, let Taste of ________ commence!

While Supercrawl is marginally better, it would be roundly dismissed as lame in a city like Montreal. Believe me, I'm currently working there (here?), in the middle of their festival season.
 
W. K. Lis said:
There would have been free hot dogs at the Queen's Park Canada Day celebration, until Doug Ford cancelled that one.
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Though come to think of it, Ford Fests as bastions of bouncy castles and crazed lineups for food.

(Oh and incidentally, don't think of any of this as new--remember Honest Ed's turkey giveways?)
 
I grew up in Toronto but I have to say - once you get out a bit, you realise how lacking it is in the 'fun factor' and you ask yourself "Why is that?"

I've had firiends who've come to visit since I've moved MTL and said "This could never happen in Toronto" and they're right - it couldn't!

It has been really bothering me for a while - why is Toronto such a boring city? I dont know the answer though I do know why other cities aren't boring.

To give you an example of what could never possibly happen in Toronto I give you Mural, not considered a huge festival by Montreal standards, just a big one. 2nd tier. An 11 day closure of St-Laurent..

There is absolutely no possible way that anything even approaching this could ever occur in Toronto, I'm sorry. Not anything even remotely similar.

And the Hamilton thing?... whatever.

I'm sure there's a Hamilton-Wentworth butter tart festival!

 
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Went to BIG on Bloor Saturday, a street festival between Lansdowne and Dufferin. Very lame. This one didn't even have a bouncy castle! Same boring, non-neighbourhood related vendors you see everywhere else. One place had a big sandwich board advertising "boozy" snowcones, which I thought was a unique idea, but upon inquiring said that we would have to go inside to have them, even though the snowcone machine was on the street next to a patio. What?? Also, the music: generic pub rock band. They were serviceable for the style, but I don't understand why such boring bands even exist.

Went to the first Taste of Germany at the Brickworks on Sunday. What a disaster. You know something's seriously wrong when even Germans can't properly organize a festival. I saw stands offering the following: Mexican churros and tacos, Tibetan momos, Turkish snacks, Caribbean patties, etc...just about everything except actual German food, which was the whole point of going there. We later found out that massive crowds had shown up hours before the event even opened, and that all the German food ran out by noon. Yet, you'd be hard pressed to find an actual German restaurant anywhere downtown. I'd kill to have access to a schnitzel, currywurst, or leberkaese whil;e on lunch at work. Where are these masses when it comes to supporting local restaurants?? Just another bitter experience for me with these lame events. There was a Dimpflmeier table with maybe 6 loaves of bread. They had a bouncy castle though!
 
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