Global News Edmonton has reported:

The Backstreet Boys have scheduled 12 concerts at Toronto’s Rogers Centre in 2027, doubling the venue record of six shows set by Taylor Swift during her 2024 Eras Tour. The group cited “overwhelming demand” for the run, which could draw nearly half a million concertgoers, with tickets priced from about $100 to more than $1,000 for VIP packages.

The scale of the booking comes as some major performers have cancelled or reduced tours amid questions about ticket sales. Meghan Trainor scrapped her tour this year, Zayn Malik cancelled U.S. dates and Post Malone scaled back his stadium run. The artists gave varying reasons for their decisions, but the cancellations have fuelled speculation about a wider slowdown in demand.

The Backstreet Boys’ Toronto residency, titled “Into the Millennium - Homecoming: Live in Canada,” is drawing fans who grew up with the group and are now approaching middle age. For some, the concerts offer a chance to revisit a period before adulthood, when entertainment could mean listening to a CD and dancing with friends.

Chelsea Smith, a 35-year-old fan from Vancouver, said her response to news of the Toronto dates was: “Here’s my credit card, take all my money.” She has already travelled to Las Vegas to see the group and is preparing to fly across the country for two Toronto concerts, spending about $600 on tickets alone.

Smith, who describes herself as a “Y2K-era girlie,” made two trips to the Backstreet Boys’ Las Vegas Sphere residency last year. She said she had not seen a Top 40 act in many years and believes the pandemic helped renew interest in familiar music. “I feel like during COVID we all retreated back to our nostalgia,” said Smith, a customer support professional. “Times are tough. You’re going back to when it was simpler and just living in that moment.”

The group’s popularity in Canada reaches back to the late 1990s, when its success could bring crowds into downtown Toronto. Bill Welychka, a former MuchMusic VJ, recalled thousands of teenagers gathering outside the music channel’s Queen Street West headquarters to catch sight of the five American performers.

“There were certain bands where we knew we’d have to hire security, where we would have to close the street down. The Backstreet Boys were certainly one of those bands,” Welychka said. “I think they fed off of that energy and the applause and the screams and the tears.”

Canada was the first North American market to embrace the group, and Welychka remembered the enthusiasm spreading from Europe to Quebec and then across the country as MuchMusic played the band’s videos frequently. “We latched on to them very, very early on,” he said.

The boy-band boom eventually eased as musical tastes shifted in the 2000s. The Backstreet Boys moved from stadium-scale attention to more theatre and casino performances, while many of their original fans entered adulthood. Welychka said some may now be drawn to memories of a time when their biggest responsibility was keeping a Tamagotchi alive.

“It’s a different day and age now. It’s a lot more frustrating,” Welychka said, pointing to unemployment and the cost-of-living crisis. “A lot of people want to get those feelings back you once had. If you’re a 45-year-old woman and screaming and crying, nothing wrong with that.”

Eleni Papamichelakis, a 39-year-old mother from Durham Region, drifted away from the group as she grew older, then rediscovered her teenage enthusiasm at the Las Vegas Sphere residency last year. She plans to take her 11-year-old daughter to see the band, as her own family took her when she was that age in 1998.

Papamichelakis, a mortgage agent, said part of the attraction is recalling a time before smartphones, when friends had to find ways to entertain themselves. “The world and, like, life has changed and it’s become so digital and sometimes a little bit impersonal,” she said. “We lived in such a fun era where we had to kind of entertain ourselves.”

She said being older also gives her more choice about where to sit. “We have the money to go and see these concerts in a better seat than when we were younger.”

Scott Henderson, a professor of popular culture at Trent University, said nostalgia is becoming a more central source of ticket sales for major venues as the touring market faces uncertainty. “It’s kind of fuelling the industry in ways it never used to,” Henderson said. “That used to be a separate market, that nostalgia market. Now it’s what big venues like the Rogers Centre are going to have to look for.”

Henderson said millennials who have more money to spend are willing to pay extra for premium seats, giving concert promoters a dependable audience. “That’s your guaranteed audience.”

For Vanessa Capozi, a 39-year-old mother of two from the Montreal area, the concerts offer time away from daily responsibilities. “Life has taken over right now,” said Capozi, a special education technician. “Rarely do people my age take time for themselves.”

When the Backstreet Boys perform, she said, she can return to the perspective of her younger self. “For those two hours, nothing else exists. I’m just there as me, that teenager, watching the Backstreet Boys.”