Emerge Blog

Dear Emerge Patrons,

I was just in the process of reading some on line papers and noticed that the city of Toronto is looking to hit live concerts with an additional 5% tax on live events.

At this time you’re already paying 16% of taxes on each ticket for the majority of concerts: 10% PST and 6% GST.  We always sell tickets including taxes so you may not be aware of that.  If the City of Toronto implements the additional tax, we’re up to 21%.  As an example here’s some tax breakout:

$15 ticket = $12.39 + $2.61 in taxes
$20 ticket = $16.53 + $3.47 in taxes
$25 ticket = $20.66 + $4.34 in taxes
$40 ticket = $33.06 + $6.94 in taxes

You get the picture.  Emerge wants to make sure that music fans who support developing music are able to see as many shows as possible.  Those numbers don’t factor in other fees that the promoters have to pay along with the drastically increasing cost of insurance.

Info about the tax plan can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/196305.  It may only be in the discussion process but we feel that you should be aware of these issues as the reality is that this will impact you, the fans, directly.

Don’t make music a sin.  Stand up for the right to be a fan.

Thanks for reading.

Jacob from Emerge