All together now: Let’s pitch in to help our struggling festivals

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Michael Barclay writes the newsletter That Night in Toronto and is the author of Hearts on Fire: Six Years That Changed Canadian Music 2000-05.

A group of Vancouver musicians sets up in front of indifferent passers-by at a jammed street festival in Toronto. Only about a dozen among the hundreds of people present know who’s about to perform. This act hasn’t played the city in more than five years – not that it was ever a big draw in the first place. There are loud DJs in front of storefronts 100 metres in either direction. Most people nearby are either in motion, or in line for food. Tough crowd.

But within minutes of Art d’Ecco taking the stage, the space in front fills up immediately, where indifference turns to mildly curious turns to OMG-what-is-this by the end of the second song. Art d’Ecco’s band is hot, playing like they could fill a stadium. The singer himself is wildly charismatic, and the songs sound like a distillation of David Bowie’s biggest hits. It’s all original material. It’s safe to assume that the riveted crowd just found their new favourite act.

This scene, which happened earlier this month at Toronto’s Do West Fest, is what happens at festivals. Ideally.

But many arts and culture festivals are struggling financially these days, with some facing risk of ending, meaning magic moments like this might become rarer. While Do West Fest, a city-funded street festival that saw more than 900,000 attendees this year, seems to be thriving, many other cultural festivals are facing existential threats.

According to a March, 2025, lobbyist document from Festivals and Major Events (FAME) Canada, it costs up to 40 per cent more to operate a festival in 2025 than it did in 2019. “If the pandemic can be likened to a major earthquake,” it reads, “what has followed in the sector is a tsunami.”

Meanwhile, sponsors are pulling back, notably TD Bank’s absence from jazz festivals in Toronto and Calgary. Pride Toronto, the second-largest such event in the world, saw several corporate sponsors, including Google and Home Depot, opt out or scale back this year.

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The long-running Regina Folk Festival and Vancouver Island MusicFest both aren’t holding events this year. Last March, the Toronto version of Just for Laughs didn’t find their financials all that funny, and called off the fall fest. The fact that the internationally renowned Hot Docs Festival actually happened this year was a minor miracle, after a fraught year and leadership challenges. Even Montreal’s Osheaga is not yet sold out, and that’s a pop festival stacked with acts that easily fill arenas and amphitheatres on their own; its audience is usually about 65 per cent from outside Quebec.

Do West Fest, a free event run by the Little Portugal Toronto BIA, is able to draw on City of Toronto grants that are doled out to 63 other festivals. The city has given those festivals a further financial boost to help with inflationary costs, and a new grant this year covers increased security, including “hostile-vehicle-mitigation units” after the tragic April attack on the Lapu-Lapu festival in Vancouver left 11 people dead. Free festivals are, obviously, not in a position to raise ticket prices to cover new costs, of which there are many.

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Ticketed events face their own challenges – these festivals aren’t feeling all that festive lately. Extreme weather – or even just a soggy weekend – could have a ruinous effect on last-minute ticket sales that are increasingly vital to a festival’s success. The cost of A-list headliners – especially non-Canadian ones – is increasingly prohibitive for smaller festivals. Last year the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival lost about $100,000, due mostly to the high costs of its American headliners, and is now in dire straits.

Ideally, that would mean audiences would embrace the adventure of discovering an artist they never knew existed before, with whom they will fall in love and then evangelize to all their yet-to-be-enlightened friends, holding an “I-saw-them-when” card for the rest of that artist’s career.

But it’s 2025. Do people want novelty? Audiences are battling uncertainty in every aspect of their lives right now. Do they want to spend all day outdoors around (ugh) other people, standing in interminable lines, hoping that a musical act doesn’t suck? What if (gasp) it rains for hours on end? And how long will it take to get out of the parking lot? In 2025, sitting on the couch scrolling TikTok is an easy default. It shouldn’t be.

This year, Winnipeg has a killer lineup for their folk fest’s 50th anniversary, following record-breaking attendance in 2024 – though this year it is not yet sold out. And a few days prior to the start of the 65-year-old Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, it also had tickets left, despite the presence of red-hot Americana act Waxahatchee (which is also appearing at the Winnipeg Folk Festival), and other big names.

Folk festival audiences, however, are nothing if not loyal, partly because these events offer plenty of shade and a family-friendly environment. The beloved Edmonton Folk Festival sells out every year. Ontario’s Hillside Festival, near Guelph, Ont., has had a bumpy decade, both for the usual reasons and because, pre-pandemic, a large corporate festival in nearby Barrie was held on the same weekend as Hillside for three consecutive years, putting a dent in their attendance from youth and out-of-towners.

But Hillside’s new executive director, Kate Johnston, says 2024 “truly felt like the jubilant festival atmosphere returned,” and that this year they’ve had record-high early-bird ticket sales. A primary reason for Hillside’s endurance is its reputation as a “discovery festival,” says Ms. Johnston – that’s code for not being able to afford big headliners. But that’s all the more reason Hillside has leaned into its unique identity, says Ms. Johnston: net-carbon-zero, surrounded by water, local food, camping, and a family focus.

Four Winds is a relatively new festival in rural Ontario, located between Guelph and Owen Sound near the town of Durham, population 2,500. It features an all-Canadian lineup, and can accommodate 5,000 people, comparable to more established nearby festivals like Hillside and Summerfolk. This spring, Ontario reaffirmed its annual $20-million in funding to festivals, but Four Winds, founded in 2022, doesn’t yet qualify for any government support. “Securing corporate sponsorships is extremely difficult when you’re not working with massive attendance numbers,” says Four Winds CEO Ariana Dalie. “It’s a bit of a catch-22: sponsors want to see big numbers, but we need their support to grow those numbers.” This year, Four Winds lowered its ticket prices to encourage attendance.

All festivals have faced rising costs for basic equipment: stages, audio gear, fencing, porta-potties, etc. The good news this year is that those prices have “somewhat stabilized,” says Hillside’s Kate Johnston, “which gives us just a little bit of security in at least knowing what to expect so we can plan for it.”

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Some of the dire news of 2024 has already turned around. The Kingston WritersFest announced in January it faced “insurmountable financial challenges” and called off the 2025 festival. Yet two months later, after a successful fundraising “Angel Campaign,” the fest was back in business and is set to take place in late August. Almost the exact same thing happened to the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in 2023, which was bailed out in part by government support. Montreal’s Festival sur le Canal announced its cancellation in early April, 2025; by the end of that month it had secured enough funding to continue. The Edmonton International Fringe Festival covered some of its site costs this year by inviting donors to sponsor a porta-potty for $250, with naming rights and decorative possibilities.

Why bail out these festivals, one might ask? For every dollar spent on a ticket, says FAME, another 50 cents is spent on food and accommodations. “Many communities and commercial arteries generate income comparable to a full year’s revenue during a single short festival or event,” says its 2025 report. The organization estimates that festivals generate more than $1-billion in GDP.

For consumers, an uptick in ticket prices shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, if you compare it to the cost of individual shows throughout the rest of the year. A festival pass is usually the cost of two or three tickets to any other show at a major venue, so the bang for your buck is always high.

Someone, somewhere this summer at a festival stage will sing Joni Mitchell’s line about how “you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.”

Kingston lit fans took that to heart. So did Vancouver folkies. So might you.