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Originally Posted by CorbeauNoir
I don't know if I'm erudite enough to pin the reason down in a satisfying manner beyond just that I'm completely apathetic about the vast majority of the selections. It's certainly fair to call age a factor but I wouldn't say I'm picking up on contemporary acts noticeably less than I have in previous years and in any case Sled's never been shy about bringing in, let's call them, "legacy" selections.
The general scaling-back of the festival over the past several years hasn't helped with the feeling either. The Olympic Plaza sets are gone, a number of the old anchor venues are gone (outside of SI's control, to be fair), the free Luke's Drug Mart hype-up show is gone, some of the annual side events I liked to attend outside of the strict scope of the music programming are gone. It's starting to feel less like a legitimate all-encompassing multidisciplinary event and more like a chained series of small-to-smallish scale concerts any larger city could put on any given weekend purely incidentally, if that makes any sense.
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It’s definitely been scaled down. I imagine sponsorships are harder to come by because of the economy. And live venues are closing like crazy. Zak used to subsidize it when he was running it at the start and they struggled to replace that funding.
I do think the acts aren’t as big as well. I remember 2008 and they had Drive-By Truckers, Of Montreal, Yo La Tengo, Wire, Tegan And Sara, Broken Social Scene, Mogwai, and Jonathan Richman just at Millenium Park.
There aren’t as many comedians either, and they used to have more headliners. Those shows always had lineups so it isn’t lack of interest.
I don’t think any of this is the festival’s fault. It’s just the reality of life in Calgary post oil boom. I’m still going to have trouble seeing every band I want to see so I won’t complain too much about the quality of music.