A Juno award winner and Grammy-nominated artist said he is struggling to sell tickets to his upcoming tour and is sparking a bigger conversation about the state of Canada’s music industry.
“I’m extremely embarrassed to tell you this but I’m going to tell you anyway,” he said in a TikTok video. “If I don’t sell twenty or so thousand tickets to my tour in the next 48 hours it’s going to be canceled.”
The 32-year-old’s honesty is striking a chord, with the video garnering more than 1.3 million views on TikTok.
He told CityNews, he’s been trying to put sincerity before his ego, “… and this felt like an opportunity to do that and just be straight up with the squad that things were going wrong, and I hoped that if they wanted to come see this show that maybe they could buy tickets in advance.”
Saxe is also sharing his message in support of smaller artists who play mid-sized venues, a number of which have been shuttered in Toronto over the past few years.
YouTuber and music expert Alex Brewda thinks concert-goers have changed their spending habits due to sky-high prices for big-ticket artists.
“A small venue show that might be five, ten bucks, it’s very easy to save up five, ten dollars. You just don’t buy fast food one day,” said Brewda. “That medium-sized show, you start getting into the hundred dollar range. You start looking at that and you go, ‘Okay I might put that towards a Coldplay ticket or Taylor Swift ticket.’”
Brewda also said more fans are buying last minute tickets, something Saxe addressed in his TikTok:
“Just in case you were waiting till the week of, or night of, to buy a ticket, that approach just isn’t going to work because there won’t be a show to buy a ticket to.”
Saxe said only financially supporting musicians at the absolute top of the industry impacts art as a whole.
“Because if you have to be massively famous in order to have a sustainable music career, then it’s harder to take risks with what you do as an artist and what you do as someone with influence.”
His one ask of concert-goers is, “If you have 10 artists that are your favorite artists and you’re deciding which tickets to buy, buy tickets for the ones that are playing the smallest venues.”
If enough tickets sell and the ‘Make Yourself at Home’ tour moves forward, Saxe is set to play Massey Hall October 1, 2025. He told CityNews it’s been a dream to play this iconic venue since he was young.
