Live Nation announces a brand new seasonal concert venue for Toronto

Yep. It’s at Downsview Park. And it’s a stadium, too.

The new venue–capacity 50,000–will the GTA’s largest purpose-built music venue. It’ll be seasonal–read: open-air–and will have all the state-of-the-art features artists and fans demand. And Rogers gets to name it. It will be Rogers Stadium.

It will be a horseshoe-like structure with seating and standing configurable to suit any particular event.

Opening next year, the stadium will be on 44 acres at the north end of the old airport’s runway “serving as a temporary fixture as Northcrest’s $30B transformative masterplan unfolds over the coming years.”

Downsview has been under-utilized as a space for music events for decades. But what can you do when there’s an active runway in the middle of the property. That’s no longer a problem now that all aircraft manufacturing activity has ended. The site is accessible by car (the 401 is right there) and subway. It’s also big enough that noise shouldn’t be a problem for the surrounding neighbourhoods. Hey, it was an airport, right?

The site has seen plenty of musical events over the years–SARStock in 2003, Edgefest in 2005, and a bunch of others (including the Radiohead event that was aborted when the stage collapsed just before showtime). In all those cases, though, the staging and other facilities have been temporary one-time-only structures.

This stadium, however, will also be temporary but will be in use for five years. After that? Not sure.

Meanwhile, this reminds me of what Live Nation did for Adele in Munich this past summer when she played for about a month in a “pop-up” venue that held 80,000 people.

Why build another stadium when there’s already the Rogers Centre downtown? Because of scheduling problems. With the Blue Jays occupying 81 days between April and September, it makes routing big tours through Toronto difficult. Big tours also require 2-5 days for setup and 1-2 days for load-out. Want to know why some big tours have bypassed Toronto in passing years, now you know. The Budweiser Stage is also too small for mega-shows.

Live Nation expects to host 12-15 concerts at Downsview, beginning in June and ending at the End of September.

And yeah, it’ll open for business for the summer of 2025. And guess who will probably be one of the first acts to play there? Oasis. Expect an announcement for August 24-ish real soon.