Let’s talk about the last 24 hours for a minute. Yesterday morning I came to work, as I do every day. For the most part I was expecting a relatively normal day knowing that by the late afternoon our coverage of events at the JUNO Awards in Saskatoon would be needing my attention. But at 9:30am something happened that would lead to the largest cascading cancellation event I have ever experienced in all my years in this industry.
COVID-19 has been on everyone’s minds for a few months now but until this week it hasn’t really impacted us too much in North America…until Monday. On Monday Pearl Jam announced that they would be postponing their North American tour due to concerns surrounding the virus. OK, we thought, they’re from Seattle that makes sense. Seattle got hit really hard by this virus so it’s totally understandable that the band would rather be home with their family during this time of uncertainty.
On Wednesday the NCAA announced that their tournament would be played without fans and the UTAH Jazz announced that one of their players had tested positive for the virus and the NBA unilaterally postponed their season. By Thursday morning the number of NBA players positive with COVID-19 had grown to 2 and the future of the NHL season was hanging in the balance. At around 9:30am, not long after my team arrived in Saskatoon, we got word of our first JUNO event cancellation. By 11:30 all of the JUNO Week and Awards events were cancelled. As disappointing as this news was it was 100% the right move, although it would’ve been nice to get it 24 hours earlier so that our team wouldn’t have travelled to Saskatoon. But, as I always say, you can’t change the past so the focus turned to how we can make the best of the future and try to find some events to cover or artists to interview.
Alessia Cara at the JUNO Nomination Event in Toronto photo Curtis Bird
By early afternoon the NHL postponed their season and then the biggest shock wave hit later in the afternoon when we got word that Live Nation, AEG, CAA, WME, Paradigm, UTA and evenko would postpone all major arena events around the world effective immediately. In some provinces shows in smaller venues would proceed on a case by case basis, for now. To put this into perspective these are a few of the shows that we were planning on bringing you coverage for over the next few weeks: Fred Penner, Matthew Good, Zac Brown Band, Kane Brown, Pearl Jam, grandson, Justin Moore and Tracy Lawrence, Alan Doyle and Kelly Prescott, Glorious Sons and the Globetrotters. These events I can confirm have been cancelled, the latest venue to join in the chorus of cancellations being Ottawa’s National Arts Centre which has postponed all shows until April 5, 2020 effective immediately.
The good news, for now, is that there are still some smaller events going on and we will do our best to get teams out to cover as much as we can. The team in Saskatoon worked until late in the evening yesterday to coordinate a few things and it’s looking like we’ll have some incredible exclusive content to bring you all this weekend. I personally plan on covering one last show, for now, tonight before taking a bit of a break to protect my family. So for the rest of March my focus will be on behind the scenes.
This is a very chaotic time in the sports and entertainment industry. Please take a minute to remember all the men and women who work behind the scenes to put on the events that we enjoy. From publicists, stage and hospitality crews to the artists themselves. Hundreds of hours go into planning, rehearsing and setting up these events. For the JUNOs an entire year of hard work and planning by, not just the city of Saskatoon, but by members of CARAS and the publicists at Rock-It Promo that never sleep went up in smoke in the time it took to write an email yesterday. Imagine for a minute how 23 year old Alessia Cara feels right now. Cara was slated to host this year’s JUNO Awards and we know she was crazy excited about it, she could hardly contain her excitement just a month ago at the nomination announcement. In the blink of an eye that will no longer be happening, unless they find some way to reschedule this event.
The next few weeks to a month are going to be tough on all of us. We’ll do our best to get content out to you regularly but, expectedly, with fewer shows to cover there will be less content but there will always to new music and new artists to showcase and we’ve got a lot of amazing content that we’ve been anxious to put out there so watch for some exclusive interviews and features in the coming weeks.
We are watching closely as the global situation with COVID-19 continues to evolve. Our highest priority is the health and safety of our team members and I have instructed all of them, across North America, to take all necessary precautions to protect themselves, and their families. Although there may be shows to cover the decision to actually go out and cover them will be left to the person assigned to the show.
There’s a lot of fear in the media these days and we want to continue to be an outlet that you can turn to to escape that fear. God willing this will all blow over and in April we’ll return to business as usual.
As usual you can count on us to have the latest updates when events begin to get rescheduled, or cancelled. Until then stay safe and stay healthy.
