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Garth Brooks to play six shows in Saskatoon, breaks Sask. sales record

Apr 29, 2016 | 10:40 AM

Garth Brooks has proven his star power by smashing a provincial record for ticket sales in Saskatchewan.

On Friday, Brooks sold more than 86,000 tickets for SaskTel Centre in Saskatoon, with more tickets still on sale — a pace of 42 seats a second.

The previous record of 80,127 tickets sold was held by the Rolling Stones when they played two shows, October 6 and 8, 2006 at Mosaic Stadium in Regina.

A collective moment of pause took place across the province Friday morning, when tickets to the highly anticipated Garth Brooks show went on sale at 10 a.m.

Around 15 minutes before the big moment, Ticketmaster showed an additional show date on Friday, June 10 — the first announced being Sat. June 11 — at SaskTel Centre.

After tickets went on sale, four more show times were announced, bringing the Garth Brooks show train to a whopping six performances:

Thursday, June 9 at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, June 10 at 7 p.m.
Friday, June 10 at 10:30 p.m.
Saturday, June 12 at 7 p.m.
Saturday, June 12 at 10:30 p.m.
Sunday, June 13 at 7:30 p.m.

Fans like Alex Dormuth, who works at CJME in Regina, have been waiting for a long time to see the legendary country music artist live.

“He’s No.1 on my bucket list for concerts to see and I really need to take my wife to this concert; she’s arguably his biggest fan and she’s never seen him before,” he said, noting she listened to Garth Brooks almost exclusively when they first met.

That’s why Dormuth will be prepared to hit the buy button down to the very second tickets go on sale at ticketmaster.ca.

“I’ll be at work, but my office has two computers set up so I’ll be waiting to get tickets on both of those. I’ll probably bring my laptop; I’ll have a tablet going and I might even try Ticketmaster on my phone,” he said.

“This is one of the biggest concerts to ever come to Saskatchewan, there’s so much hype and I know so many people who will be fighting me to get tickets and I need to get there first.”

Dormuth said he missed seeing Brooks in concert the last time he rolled through the province because he was only about six years old.

“It’s just timeless music, probably the best country artist of all time, but I want to see the stage show,” he said.

“We’ve seen concerts of his before on DVD, but just the show that he puts on looks absolutely incredible.”