Live Nation Plan Calls For All-Season Ontario Place Music Venue
When opened, the new winter concert facility will become the only mid-point sized venue providing a stage to acts that have outgrown the city's numerous 1-3K seat concert halls and the several vast year-round sports arenas.
By David Farrell
The Ontario government has announced details of its plan to revitalize Ontario Place that includes approval for Live Nation to re-tool its seasonal 16K-capacity Budweiser Stage amphitheatre into a year-round live music venue with a 20,000 outdoor capacity and 9,000 indoors.
The 155-acre mixed-use Toronto waterfront park has been a financial boondoggle to the provincial government for over a decade and faces a number of regulatory hurdles before the transformation of the half-century old parkland has met necessary approvals. The schedule for the official re-opening with the new music venue, and separate all-seasons water and adventure parks is 2030.
According to Live Nation, the redesigned amphitheatre will be “designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts. Completed by 2030, the new facility is expected to receive up to 1 million visitors and support more than 900 jobs during events.”
Since taking over the operations of the venue 25 years ago, Live Nation reports selling more than 8M tickets for shows by a long and impressive list of Canadian acts.
Live Nation Canada’s venue portfolio includes the 900-person-capacity Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, the 1K-capacity Midway in Edmonton, along with Toronto’s Budweiser Stage, the 1500-capacity Danforth Music Hall, the 440-capacity Velvet Underground and the to-be-opened 2500-capacity History nightclub in the Beaches East section of the city.
When operational, the new winter concert facility will become the only mid-point sized venue in the nation’s largest city, providing a stage to acts that have outgrown the numerous 1-3K seat concert halls and the year-round 53K-capacity Rogers Centre and the approximately 20K-capacity Scotiabank Arena.
