Live Nation to build 50,000-capacity dedicated concert venue in north Toronto | Canada Voices

Global events conglomerate Live Nation Entertainment Inc. says it will open a new 50,000-capacity outdoor stadium at Toronto’s Downsview Park as soon as next summer, creating what would be the country’s biggest purpose-built concert venue.

To be named Rogers Stadium, it will be built on lands owned by the Public Sector Pension Investment Board’s Northcrest Developments, which is leading a decades-long redevelopment of the 520-acre Downsview site with a neighbouring landowner, the federal crown corporation Canada Lands Co.

The massive, open-air seasonal stadium, announced Thursday, is a bet on the successful side of the bifurcated post-pandemic concert industry. Overhead costs for the vast majority of touring artists and concert venues have surged, with ticket prices often rising in tandem, prompting tour cancellations for artists as prominent as Jennifer Lopez. But today’s biggest artists, such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, can still host multi-night residencies at venues including Toronto’s Rogers Centre baseball stadium.

The live-music industry has been seeking ways to further embrace the demand of such artists’ frothing fanbases. Dedicating a purpose-built stadium to live music in Canada’s most populous city is a chance to affirm Toronto’s growing status as a “must-play market” for concerts, according to Erik Hoffman, Live Nation Canada’s president overseeing music.

“In a global touring market, artists have a lot of choices, and we need to make sure we’re not missing out on anything in Toronto,” he said in an interview Thursday.

The stadium will have a limited life: Northcrest has plans to develop the site, at the north end of a former airport runway, into residential housing in the coming decades, and declined to share the length of Live Nation’s multi-year lease. The structure will neither have the permanence, nor the major construction time, of a major sports stadium. This will help Live Nation as it races to build before its ambitious planned opening date – next June. No performers were announced Thursday.

The Rogers Stadium is expected to have seats for 30,000 fans, with the rest standing. It will be shaped as a three-quarter stadium with a removable standard stage at the end, which will allow big-name artists to bring in their own customized stages. (It will neither have the facilities nor the pitch to accommodate a sports team, Hoffman said.)

Though flexible outdoor spaces such as Burl’s Creek Event Grounds north of Toronto, or the Magnetic Hill Concert Site in Moncton, can host tens of thousands more people than Rogers Stadium is expected to, only a handful of purpose-built stadiums in Canada are bigger. And they’re often attached to professional sports teams, such as Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, home of the CFL’s Elks. Parc Jean-Drapeau’s Espace 67 in Montreal, the 65,000-capacity home of the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival, does not have a permanent stage.

Live Nation expects the site to host 12 to 15 performances a year, augmenting but not necessarily eating into the tours that stop downtown at the Rogers Centre baseball stadium. Asked about the profitability of a stadium with limited performances, given the expensive nature of Toronto real estate, Hoffman declined to go into specifics, but acknowledged the endeavour as an “immense bet.”

There will be sponsorship and other income, but when it comes to tickets, he said, “we believe all the shows will be full.”

The post-industrial Downsview site has a long history of hosting major music events, including the infamous 2003 Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto concert, also known as SARSstock, the Rolling Stones-headlined event held to boost Toronto’s fortunes and spirits after the breakout and containment of SARS. Downsview has also been home to festivals such as Veld and Riot Fest, and was the site of the 2012 stage collapse that killed Radiohead drum technician Scott Johnson.

The Downsview Lands, just north of Highway 401, include a former airfield that has been an airport, military base and, starting in the 1990s, a testing facility for Bombardier Inc. The Public Sector Pension Investment Board bought its swath from Bombardier in 2018 in one of the biggest land deals in Canadian history, valued at the time at about $817-million.

The pension fund-owned Northcrest has since revealed plans to turn its 370 acres into seven neighbourhoods under the name YZD, the airport’s call sign. Together, Northcrest and Canada Lands hope the lands will house as many as 83,500 residents by 2051, with new neighbourhoods linked by a two-kilometre pedestrian street along the former runway.

Live Nation said it selected the 44-acre location for its transportation and transit connections to the rest of the Greater Toronto Area. The idea was hatched about eight months ago, Hoffman said, when he spoke with the representative of a major artist who couldn’t fit Toronto into their touring plans. “Can’t you just build me a stadium?,” Hoffman said the representative asked. Though this may have been in jest, Hoffman began making calls. (He declined to name the artist.)

With some of the land not slated for development for decades, Derek Goring, Northcrest’s chief executive officer, said there was an opportunity to invite people from across the GTA to enjoy the site in the interim. Live Nation got in touch about six months ago, he said, and they were an “obvious” candidate to use the space.

Live Nation is not alone in pinning its hopes on the future of live music on major spectacles. The US$2.3-billion, 20,000-capacity, LED-covered spherical venue, Sphere, opened in Las Vegas with a U2 residency last year to rave reviews and frequent questions about costs. Run by the same family that owns Madison Square Garden, the Sphere’s owners revealed in public filings that the venue had an operating loss of US$341.2-million in the fiscal year ending June, 2024.

Though 2023 was Live Nation’s biggest-ever year for attendance, ticket sales and sponsorship activity, it missed analysts’ estimates for profit growth last quarter owing to its high operating expenses.

The conglomerate is also facing legal questions over allegedly anticompetitive behaviour. Since merging with ticketing giant Ticketmaster in 2010, Live Nation has gained control of enormous swaths of the global live music industry, where it promotes, runs and handles tickets for events.

The U.S. Justice Department and 30 state and district attorneys-general announced in May that they would sue Live Nation over monopolizing concert markets, with U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland seeking to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster. In Toronto, Live Nation has faced scrutiny for its growing market share among the city’s most well-known concert venues.