Yesterday, The Coast’s business office received the following email from Harold MacKay, of Power Promotional Events:
As you are aware Power Promotional Events Inc, has experienced a significant cash flow shortfall and we have now exhausted all of our efforts to try and resolve this situation. It is therefore with much regret that we inform you that Power Promotional Events Inc. will cease operations and we sincerely apologize for not being able to fulfill our obligations to you.
We thank you for your support over the years helping us to try and create Halifax as a destination for major events and again we regret this very unfortunate result.
Power was the producer of the Paul McCartney, KISS, Country Rocks and the Black Eyed Peas concerts on the Common. As The Coast previously reported, despite a publicized attendance of 50,000, only 26,000 tickets were sold to the McCartney show, and Power Promotions lost $700,000 on the concert. Sales were so low for the Black Eyed Peas show—rumour has it that only 5,000 tickets were sold—that Power was giving away thousands of tickets in the week before the show, even scattering free tickets at Rainbow Haven Beach.
The email was reportedly sent to all Power creditors, including The Coast, which is owed money for ad space. Claiming it is owed $14,699, Maritime Broadcast System filed a lawsuit against Power last week. Other creditors include Tour Tech East, Royal Flush and Commercial Tent.
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Promoter Harold MacKay asked province for additional $700,000 to cover Halifax Common concerts
Concert economics
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 6, 2010.
There is a G-d!!! Praise be. Karma is a wonderful thing. Now he can go off and destroy someone else’s community. SEE YA!!!
PS: It’s the COMMONS not the COMMON!!!! Is this some Bedford/Torontonia conspiracy? The first thing fascists love to do is to RENAME their conquered lands; it makes them feel less guilty. wise up Coasty.
IMO
In your opinion indeed. This is sad news for Halifax. I commend the promoters for sticking it out and delivering a couple of concerts even though the outlook was bleak. I hope this doesn’t send a signal to other major promoters or new startups that throwing major concerts in Halifax is not profitable.
How exactly is the community ‘better served’ without major entertainment events? Garage and cover bands all year long? Local talent is great, but there are people with all kinds of musical tastes living in the city. No offense, but the music scene in Halifax is a one-trick-pony (with rare exceptions).
Coast style has always been to call the Halifax Common by its legal name: The Common, no “S”.
What’s with the quotation marks around “better served,” issmat? I don’t see that phrase anywhere in IMO’s comment. The community is better served by having land whose common use they pay for with their taxes actually left usable, instead of having it fenced off and being charged money to render it unusable for its designated purpose.
I hate the ‘s’ too, by the way. Nobody started calling it this until maybe 10 years ago. The Commons are the grounds to be shared by the people who pay for them, i.e. the common. See Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Nice to see Lezlie Lowe putting the ‘s’ back in, now that she’s over at the Herald.
Common. North Common, South Common, all together is the Common. Not commons. Like how a piece of pie, and another piece of pie, does not make two pieces of pies. It would be two pieces of pie.
grumpus- every paper has its own style guide, for how to spell much-used geographic names and such. Lezlie can write whatever she wants, for either paper, and her editors will change the spelling to confirm with the style guide.
issmat: “I commend the promoters for sticking it out and delivering a couple of concerts even though the outlook was bleak.”
When MacKay was going to the province for funding, the outlook wasn’t bleak. Everything was awesome and kickin’ rad and it was IMPOSSIBLE TO LOSE MONEY. You can’t really commend that kind of behaviour.
issmat: “I commend the promoters for sticking it out and delivering a couple of concerts even though the outlook was bleak.”
If you asked MacKay when he was going to the province for massive subsidies, the outlook wasn’t bleak, the outlook was amazing, kickin’ rad even! It would be impossible to lose money on this deal!
You can’t really commend that kind of behaviour when it plays out this way.
Having concerts on the Common is like using deodorant but not antiperspirant. It only masks the problem we have rather than fixing it. We need a bigger venue to bring in big acts- we can’t keep using a space that is causing problems for many Haligonians- and it obviously isn’t working. BEP should have been a great seller. It’s too bad to see the group go out of business. It hurts all of us.
Perhaps we need to refocus our energies on a bigger and better venue. It will help Hali grow and save the Commons.
1 x + 1x + 1x = 3xs. Now that the Common has been split up to many Commons, it is locally endeared to as The Commons. It’s just language that mutates on an ongoing basis.
I’ve heard it call the Commons all my life and I’m a lot older than 10. But the name thing is really not that important. It might as well be called it ‘Swarmers Field’.
I’m going to chillax now.
I hope we continue ‘Concerts on the Commons’ with a better plan and world class music acts.
There are two reasons why promoters lie about concert attendance:
1. There were too few in the audience. This reflects badly on his promotional skills and the city. It also hurts the promoters chances of landing future shows.
2. There were too many in the audience. This can cause trouble with Civic officials concerned about crowd safety and bathroom ratios.
This is why we can believe only 26,000 attended Paul McCartney and only 38, 000 attended the Rolling Stones in Halifax.
It’s also safe to say that Moncton drew many more than the reported 85, 000 for the Stones and the 75,000 for AC/DC.
Oh on the Common v/s Commons issue – everybody makes that er, mistake sometimes. Even the illustrious Mr. Mason who started a tread in Halifax Locals! called: “Commons Concert promoter Power Promotions out of business” and continues in the thread to write: “Some historical op/eds of mine on Commons Concerts…”
We’re all human in the end.
Finnally the concert war is over and Moncton can take it’s rightful place as the Concert capital of the Maritimes so that we the Maritimes can see world class events every year.
It’s time that we support Magnetic Hill and not compete so we can enjoy the blessings.
Finnally the concert war is over and now Moncton’s Magnetic Hill can take it’s rightful place as the Maritimes concert capital. It’s all about location, location, location! We have to stop competeing and supporting one another. I just hope that all this competition hasn’t ruined future shows. We have to face it Moncton can draw the numbers and Halifax is just too far away from most maritime cities.
Holy Crow Mr. Issmat. If this doesn’t send a pretty clear signal to you that the concerts were not profitable what exactly would?
Also, disrespecting the local music scene in Halifax is simply unserious. You must know as much about it as you do accounting.
To take a little walk down memory lane here – the argument was that the concerts would not make economic sense without government support and there was general agreement that there should not be government support for this type of thing. So what has happened here is, in spite of years of secrecy and lies, that position has turned out to be exactly correct. You can fool some of the people some of the time…
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Waye, I didn’t know you were posting “tread”(s) on Halifax Locals. Fun!
John Wesley Chisholm
Did the World Trade Center Group have something to do with these concerts?
HalifaxIsn’tToronto– yes. Trade Centre Limited received $300,000 from the province for Paul McCartney ticket sales, and was to pay it back when sales met some secret level, which wasn’t reached.
And anyone is surprised about this – how? I’m sure Mr Mckay got his money. As for the effect on the economy here? Just ask those companies who are owed money how it is affecting them. Great way how this promoter stuck it out, more like how he stuck it to us. Will we learn? Not while promoter Kelly is in office.
Thank you for your answer Mr. Bousquet. It’s yet another reason to doubt the Trade Centre Limited’s business projections for a new convention centre.
Under their watch, even Paul McCartney bombed and lost big money. We would have to be nuts to trust these people with $160 million.
By the way, policing services for these concerts was only supposed to be provided free of charge if the concert drew over 40,000. That never happened did it? So somebody owes the city some money for that too.
Hi JWC –
The signal is indeed clear. But we can hope, can’t we? The other alternative is to resign to the fact that major concerts are never going to happen again in Halifax. That’s a dark thought that I’d like to ignore, even if foolishly so.
I’d like to think that there is something the government can do to support these kinds of initiatives instead of putting up every possible barrier and accommodating every critical voice without a clear vision and plan for the future of entertainment in the city.
I didn’t insult the local music scene. I said there was great talent here, but very little musical variety. I’m sure you can agree with that. It’s why every bar that caters to salsa or reggae music fails, and every bar that rocks cover bands singing ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ survives.
There are very strong cultural preferences in Halifax, and that isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. But we have to at least acknowledge that these preferences create deficits in other areas of Arts and Culture, and have a plan to address those to deficits.
Caesar,
Actually, if I put my ‘Atlantic’ hat on, I think I agree with you. Having Moncton be the concert hub of the region will work much better than trying to divide the ever-shrinking pie of concert goers in the Maritimes.
Besides, what’s more fun than an affordable road trip with friends and loved ones to go see a major concert?
… still, I would much prefer if that hub was Halifax. 🙂
issmat, what it boils down to – this is my sincere opinion – is that Moncton is the natural hub for the Maritimes. A body just has to look at a map to see how the Maritime Provinces centre on Moncton. Travel distances argue for Moncton as the destination for big entertainment events, both sports and music. It’s not a new stadium in Moncton that pulls sporting events there, it’s location that made the new stadium feasible. You could in fact build a new stadium in Halifax, or a new convention centre, and basically all of them will fail – Halifax is in the wrong spot.
For what it’s worth the entire Atlantic Gateway strategy is toast too, mainly because Halifax is NOT geographically in a good spot, it’s actually in a shitty spot. Mark my words, Burnside has effectively peaked, and although there will still be construction and some expansion, and we’ll probably even see the Burnside Connector built, fact is that Burnside is poised for the long slide.
For the record I dislike Moncton, and I’d drive gravel into my kneecaps with a mallet before I ever live there…but I can accept that it’s the natural hub of the Maritimes.
Wow, frisbee 24/7 all next summer. Wonderful.
Hotels will still be full, except they will have tourists spending more than rock fans who quibble about the price and then cram 4 or 6 in each room.
Restaurants downtown do more business in winter than in the summer but city hall & TCL will never admit it.
Moncton can have the CFL and rock concerts but who the hell would want to live there ?
Maybe if they didn’t choose such shitty acts for the Common gigs more people would have paid to attend.
At the end of the day the only way you can make money is by providing a product that sells. Kid Rock and BEP on the Commons? I can’t imagine how they crunched the numbers and projected a profit with that one. Kid Rock could play the Forum and NOT sell out. BEP could have headlined Summer Rush on the Dartmouth waterfront and everyone who wanted to see them would have gotten a chance. Having a concert on the commons just for the sake of having a concert there was ridiculous and reckless. To me it seems more like a political decision than a business one.
Excellent point, hockeynut. For the most part the Magnetic Hill concerts have been no brainer successes (AC/DC, Eagles, Stones) all huge acts that draw large crowds and cross numerous demographics. Also, the location of the Commons lends to ease of listening to the concert for free, something which is not as easy to do at Magnetic Hill. These factors, amongst others, lead to the success of the Moncton concerts, and concurrently the failure of the Commons concerts.
Peter Kelly pranced around in costume with Darrel Dexter shamelessly promoting McCartney as part of an on-going ego “fix”. It is no surprise that the taxpayers are on the hook for approximately $700,000.00 as a result of these expropriations of public lands for the enjoyment of a few. Forty million for a Bedford ice rink ( isn’t Kelly from Bedford?) and both Kelly and Dexter are talking of blowing another MINIMUM of 100 million on a Convention Centre. Wake up people! Your children’s grand children and beyond will be paying for the poor financial decisions being made today by Kelly & Dexter.
If either HRM or the province has $50 million each plus to piss away start asking them why it isn’t being put into health care , that everyone requires rather than services for the elite.
Too much old thinking in many of these comments. This is the 21st century and the idea that a physical hub is of any real importance is a 19th century construct. The power hubs in this century and beyond are where the technological leadership and knowledge prevail. We will be travelling less and less and using innovative communications technology much more.