After some technical difficulties, Lindsay Lebrun won the live auction that awarded her the best seats in the house for the performance by Hozier at Bluesfest on July 11.
It was fitting for Lebrun, a worker at the Crown’s attorney’s office who said she deserved “a treat for myself” and her boyfriend.
“(Hozier) sounds better live than he does on his album,” Lebrun told the Ottawa Citizen while running to her seats. The winning bid was $2,300, benefitting the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
It was CHEO Night at Bluesfest, which meant all proceeds from the
best seats in the house auction
went towards the pediatric hospital’s Kids these Days fundraising program. The proceeds from the 50/50 raffle also went to CHEO.
On other days, proceeds from best seats in the house and the 50/50 raffles go towards Bluesfest’s Blues in the Schools, which provides music education to Ottawa students.
The best-seats live auction allows Bluesfest attendees to bet to win two seats on the wings of the stage, giving superfans an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at performances. They also get an intimate concert experience from their birds-eye view of the entire band.
Bids can be made on both the opener and the main act for the RBC Stage, where the festival’s biggest names perform.
The auction has gone digital this year. In years prior, bids would be made silent-auction style on sheets of paper at the best-seats booth. Now bids can be made through the Bluesfest app or after scanning QR codes found at the booth.
Robin Cuda is a supervisor at the Poster Gallery, which also organizes the best-seats live auction. She says the digital system changes the dynamic. Previously, she remembers, live auctions happening in person would have two groups bidding against each other as the auction closed down at 8:45 p.m.
Now, bids happen live and attendees and volunteers watch the dollar amounts rise, often sluggishly earlier in the night, but frantically later on.
On Thursday, one fan paid $3,000 for the best seats in the house for Lainey Wilson’s performance, while The Red Clay Strays auction reached $300, Cuda said.
For the longest time the record for the biggest bid was $5,300 for the Dave Matthews Band in Bluesfest 2018. Kevin O’Connell had travelled from Philadelphia to Ottawa following the band so he could see his 398th to 400th Dave Matthews concerts.
At the time O’Connell was honouring his late husband, who he had met at a Matthews concert a decade earlier.
“It was pretty surreal and definitely a different perspective,” O’Connell said at the time. “To do something like that was hard to pass up on, especially knowing the money is going to such a great cause. Supporting the arts is a big part of my philosophy in life.”
It was only last year that a new record was set as a fan paid $5,500 for the best seats for Maroon 5.
“That’s the benefit of bidding. It’s not just for yourself, it’s for someone else as well,” Lebrun said. “So it’s rewarding, too.”
