Nettspend Pulls Out 20 Minutes Before Showtime, First Class Fest Powered Through With Back-to-Back OsamaSon Sets

Three days before First Class Fest was set to start, Jake Pretorious and Leo Strang got the call: Nettspend was out. He wasn't the only one — Che and Black Kray had already dropped off earlier that week — but Nettspend had been slated as the headliner for the second night of the two-day run, and the call left the two founders scrambling.

"You do everything you can — contracts, legal, all the effort in the world — but sometimes someone just doesn't want to do something, whatever the reason," Strang told The FADER six days after the festival wrapped. "We got the call from Nettspend's camp about 20 minutes before he publicly announced he was pulling out... We started thinking about replacements immediately."

The two eventually decided to ask night one's headliner, OsamaSon, if he'd be willing to play a second set. "He and Nett are basically the faces of this whole emerging underground scene," Strang said. "So outside of putting Osama back onstage, we couldn't think of a better replacement." The subject of The FADER's documentary Psychotic chose a setlist for the night largely pulled from unreleased material from earlier eras, closing things out for Lucki.

It All Started With Playboi Carti Getting Stuck at the Border

Strang and Pretorious first met four years ago, thanks to a show that never happened — Playboi Carti was scheduled to play Toronto but got held up at the border. A mutual friend threw a party instead: anyone holding a Carti ticket could get in. The two chatted briefly there, and the next day Strang went to find Pretorious, who at the time was managing a recording studio on Queen Street. Strang was running YouTube ad campaigns for artists back then and wanted to tap into Pretorious's roster for clients. That same week, the pair joined a crew of ten packed into an RV for a run of Ontario college tour dates, playing a frat house basement in Guelph. "That's really where we built our chemistry," both of them say.

First Class Fest's inaugural edition launched in 2022. "The chaos backstage felt a lot like this year," Pretorious recalled of that first show, "but I think that's exactly what trained us — it got us ready to make things happen even when things get really tense backstage."

From a 1,500-Cap Room to a Two-Day Lineup: Locking Down Lucki in Six Weeks

Planning for this year's festival began in June 2025, a full 14 months before the event. Strang says landing this year's venue involved a bit of luck — the biggest show they'd ever thrown before was a 1,500-capacity room. "So taking this on meant saying, okay, I think we're ready, because we've been putting in the work in this genre for three years now, and we should be able to book a lineup strong enough to sell out a room this size."

Locking down Lucki took about six weeks from first contact to signed contract. The show was originally planned as a single day, but their partners at the venue mentioned that the Friday slot was also open — if they could land a headliner, they could expand to two days. "We figured, if we can get OsamaSon as the headliner, we do two days; if not, we stick with one," Strang said. Once OsamaSon was locked in, it took another three and a half months to finalize the rest of the lineup.

A Panic Attack Backstage and a Word From Tezzus

Pretorious's favorite interaction from the whole event was OsamaSon's attitude — long before the replacement call, he'd been showing genuine gratitude toward the two founders throughout the process. "Every time we work with him, he takes the time to actually talk to us, to make us feel like he really appreciates what we're doing," Pretorious said.

Strang's two standout memories were more dramatic. During Apollo Red's set on night two, roughly a thousand fans jumped the barricade and rushed in, prompting police to briefly threaten to shut the show down. After some backstage negotiation, police agreed to hold off, and OsamaSon's DJ got on the mic to announce that anyone without a yellow wristband needed to leave. Once things calmed down, Strang himself got onstage to help clear people out. "That was probably the highest adrenaline rush of my life," he said, "but once I got off stage, I couldn't catch my breath — I was overheating, the stress hit me, and I had a full panic attack." He went behind the venue and took his shirt off to cool down, spotted OsamaSon's entourage nearby, and told himself, "I'm the promoter of this event, I need to be professional," before stepping aside. That's when he heard someone call his name — it was the rapper Tezzus. "He came up to me and said, 'You did it, bro, you brought it back,' and the fact that he could tell in that moment I needed to hear that — that was pretty cool."

The other memory was getting a photo with Lucki. After his set, Lucki was rushing to catch a flight, surrounded by security, with his manager repeating "no photos, straight to the car." Strang ran up and shouted, "I'm the promoter of this event, I want a photo" — Lucki stopped, and the two got the shot.

Asked about Canadian talent worth watching, Strang and Pretorious named Amo, Pnkrok, Bronclair, Yurms, and Offgrid, who played the festival back in 2023 — and pointed to Jahsh, 10kmoss & Wavy Jackson, Sorisa, Sayso, and Katozai on this year's lineup as local artists they've long supported.