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Calgarians for Cohen?

Who’d have thought a sold-out Leonard Cohen concert might spark an overhaul of how concert tickets are sold in Alberta. Not Ticketmaster.

It turns out that Leonard Cohen, the Montreal singer-songwriter and poet, has quite a fan base in Calgary, birthplace of Paul Brandt. Tickets for Cohen’s April performance there sold out within hours. Then came word premium tickets to the concert were on sale for over $850 on TicketsNow, a subsidiary of the much-maligned Ticketmaster. Now, Alberta appears poised to make ticket sales more fair. “We want arts and culture to be accessible to all Albertans and we have to be able to make sure there is a fair opportunity for every Albertan to be able to access the ticket they want,” Lindsay Blackett, Alberta’s Minister of Culture and Community Spirit, told the Calgary Sun. The Sun’s Rick Bell tells the story, in his own inimitable style, here:

Calgary Sun

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