Destiny Funk spent $2,000 for flights and hotels, plus another $35 on drinks at the venue, before learning that Lil Wayne’s Toronto concert was cancelled just as it was supposed to start.Supplied
By the time Destiny Funk learned that Lil Wayne wasn’t going to perform, she and her partner had spent $35 for two beers at the Budweiser Stage in downtown Toronto.
That was nothing compared to the $2,000 they spent on flights from Winnipeg to Toronto, along with hotels and transport to see the Grammy-award-winning rapper in August.
“The only thing we got back was the $600 chunk of concert tickets,” said 27-year-old Ms. Funk. And it took a month to be compensated that much, she said.
When she vented about the experience on social media , some dubbed the fiasco part of “the Toronto concert curse.” Others pointed to the fact that the artist had been prone to cancelling Canadian tour dates.
But the reality is that cancellations in Canada – particularly in the country’s biggest city – have edged upward across a range of live shows. Just last week, Ms. Funk received notice that the Rexx Life Raj show in Toronto she had tickets for was cancelled, too – without explanation.
The reasons for cancellations vary, but many point to broader challenges in the live music industry, which have left consumers on the hook for hundreds or thousands in delayed refunds, food and transportation costs and even flights and hotels.
“I constantly go to concerts and I’d say [there’s] five cancels a year,” said Rebecca Tandon from Toronto. Her nixed events in the past year or so alone include performances by Jhene Aiko, Kehlani, Kygo and Lil Wayne; concerts for Clairo and P1Harmony were postponed.
It may be more than a run of bad luck. Data provided to The Globe and Mail by event data company PredictHQ showed that the percentage of cancellations across live music events in Toronto grew more than four times since 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, from 0.51 per cent to 2.48 per cent so far this year.
Compared with a year ago, concert cancellations jumped 30 per cent by October to 125, up from 96 by the same point last year.
Economic headwinds, industry consolidation, technology and shifting consumer habits have multiplied challenges for the music industry. But cancellations in major Canadian concert hubs such as Toronto may be becoming more frequent than in the United States, with artists struggling to offset rising costs amid a weak loonie and the expenses of touring the vast country.
In comparison, cancellation rates in Chicago, which hosts double the number of active events as Toronto, stayed relatively flat, hovering at about 1.1 per cent from January to October of this year, similar to last year’s rate, according to PredictHQ.
A weakening loonie can factor into where artists choose to perform, said Martin Roy, executive director of Festivals and Major Events Canada, also known as FAME.
The Canadian dollar hit multiyear lows against the greenback late last year with worries of further drops in early 2025.
The drop early this year had not been as sharp as predicted, said Mr. Roy, but many Canadian festivals and events pay American artists in U.S. dollars, while their audience revenues come in Canadian dollars. “Even a 10-per-cent drop, for instance, would have a major impact,” he said.
Fees and operating costs for everything from venue booking to insurance have increased dramatically in recent years as well. Mr. Roy estimates that it now costs 30 to 40 per cent more to stage a festival in 2025 compared with 2019.
That said, Canada’s live events sector may simply be magnifying challenges across the industry at large.
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COVID-19 lockdowns cut off touring income earlier this decade. Subsequent jumps in inflation and interest rates meant musicians returned to the stage with higher overhead costs.
Ticket prices have surged higher, too, over the past decade, as promoters and ticketing companies try to offset their own higher overheads while undertaking scalper-inspired pricing strategies that test the limits of what consumers are willing to pay.
Fans take a selfie outside of a Kendrick Lamar concert at Toronto’s Rogers Centre in June. The reasons for concert cancellations vary, but many point to broader challenges in the live music industry.Laura Proctor/The Canadian Press
The new economics of live music first began prompting waves of cancellations soon after pandemic lockdowns, with artists such as Animal Collective, Cadence Weapon and Santigold scrapping concerts or whole tours. The Vancouver Folk Festival’s surging costs nearly forced it to shut down in 2023. The Regina Folk Festival shut down earlier this year after 55 years in operation, citing financial difficulties.
After cancelling a tour last year, the band The Black Keys told Rolling Stone that the cost of touring had risen by 3.5 times since 2012. Drummer Patrick Carney warned that the consolidation of the industry by players such as Live Nation LYV-N – which owns Ticketmaster and a growing number of music venues – had stripped artists of agency in arranging tours.
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Today’s young, up-and-coming artists have “absolutely zero interest in performing live,” said Toronto-based music publicist and commentator, Eric Alper. “[Their] dream is to get a million followers or reach a billion streams on Spotify.”
With incentives for live tours getting slimmer, the threshold for cancelling events may be getting lower.
Last-minute cancellations are often about musicians hitting a wall from exhaustion, said Mr. Alper. Streaming pays $0.00004 a stream, he said, meaning even a million plays yields just $4,000 before paying managers, labels and distributors.
Still, few will ever admit that they’re cancelling based on lacklustre ticket sales. Artists usually cite scheduling or visa issues, health and family emergencies, Mr. Alper said. The official reason given for the Lil Wayne concert cancellation was illness.
Canadian singer-songwriter JP Saxe was an exception.
Mr. Saxe told fans on TikTok this summer that if he didn’t sell roughly 20,000 tickets to his upcoming Make Yourself at Home tour within two days, it would be cancelled, as was the case.
And while challenges are multiplying for artists, last-minute cancellations mean fans who already have dwindling dollars to spend on entertainment are left on the hook.