Drake closing out It’s All A Blur tour with two Toronto shows

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Drake is set to wrap his upcoming tour with two nights at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on Oct. 5 and 7.

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The rapper’s It’s All A Blur trek marks the Grammy winner’s first full-scale tour since headlining the Aubrey & the Three Migos Tour in 2018.

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Tickets for the Toronto shows go on sale Friday through Live Nation, with pre-sales happening through tour sponsor Sprite on Wednesday. Ten additional dates have been added to the itinerary, which include concerts in Montreal (July 14 and 15) and Vancouver (Aug. 28 and 29).

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But Drake fans should be preparing like they’re about to appear in a real-life Hunger Games if they hope to score tickets to anticipated shows.

The ticket prices for his shows in Montreal resulted in a local-area man looking to launch a class-action suit against Ticketmaster, asserting that the company “intentionally misleads consumers for their own financial gain” by upselling “premium” tickets in the nosebleed sections.

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The application contends that “Ticketmaster unilaterally decides which tickets it advertises and sells as ‘Official Platinum’ based on a given event. The result is that most, if not all, of the tickets advertised and sold as ‘Official Platinum’ are neither ‘premium tickets’ nor ‘some of the best seats in the house’ and are, in fact, just regular tickets sold by Ticketmaster at an artificially inflated premium in bad faith.”

“This is a tactic where they squeeze the die-hard fans for as much as possible,” Joey Zukran, founder of LPC Avocat and lead counsel on the Ticketmaster case, told Toronto Life earlier this month.

Although tickets for previously announced shows started at $69, fans in other cities complained loudly on social media that Drake’s ticket prices were out of reach.

“These Drake tickets have people out here fighting for their lives,” one person wrote on Twitter with another declaring, “$200+ for nosebleed drake tickets is criminal … TICKETMASTER YOU WILL CRUMBLE.”

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The Sun looked at tickets that are on sale and nosebleed “platinum” seats for Drake’s show in Vancouver will set you back $391.17, while tickets in the lower level start at $568. In Montreal, it’ll set you back $537 to get your tush in the door for one of those fancy “platinum” tickets.

It’s not the first time Ticketmaster has found itself stoking the ire of fans.

In the U.S., Taylor Swift fans are taking the company to court, accusing it of “unlawful conduct” over the sale of her Eras Tour. “I tried in total of 41 times that first day to get tickets. It kicks you out into the queue and you’re back in and then I kept getting errors,” Julie Barfuss told CNN. “Then, I again spent a couple hours trying to do it the second day. When I finally got in and was going to buy tickets, they were like $1,400.”

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Elsewhere, The Cure frontman Robert Smith took the company to task over “unduly high” fees that were, in some instances, costing more than the price of a ticket.

Working-class rocker Bruce Springsteen was drawn into the fray as well when his fans raged about skyrocketing prices to see him on his U.S. tour.

Anticipation to see Drake in Toronto is always high. His annual OVO concerts held at Budweiser Stage over the August long weekend are one of the hottest tickets in the city. So no matter what the price, people will likely be willing to spend it.

Over the last five years, Drake has released four albums, including his most recent studio record — in collaboration with 21 Savage — Her Loss, which rocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard’s 200 chart and had all 16 songs debut on Billboard’s Hot 100 list.

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