BlackCreek music festival suspends 2012 season
Posted January 11, 2012 12:15 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Music legends Tony Bennett, James Taylor and Placido Domingo failed to draw the audiences last summer that organizers of the BlackCreek Summer Music Festival had anticipated and there won’t be a second edition of the event in 2012.
The organization said in a statement on its website that “the lower than expected ticket sales revenue proved too great of a financial challenge to move forward at this time with the 2012 season.”
The festival launched with an impressive lineup of acts that also included Diana Krall, Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons. But fans didn’t flock to the Rexall Centre at York University in the numbers organizers had hoped.
“We are still of the strong belief that Toronto and Ontario should be home to a leading summer music festival and that the benefits to the cultural community and tourism industry can be significant,” Kevin Albrecht, a member of the festival’s investor group, said in the statement.
“It has been a true challenge to launch such an ambitious undertaking and we would like to thank everyone who believes in this vision and for their support throughout. There are certainly hurdles to clear in order to move forward which cannot be achieved without long-term financial restructuring and that’s where the focus must be at this time.”
The BlackCreek event didn’t receive government funding.
The event was Canada’s only summer-long music festival and was based on similar events in the United States, where there are more than 100 such festivals, the statement said.
