TORONTO - Sarah McLachlan fans who are skipping Lilith Fair because they hope to see the Canadian chanteuse do a solo tour down the line might be out of luck.

Nettwerk CEO and Lilith Fair co-founder Terry McBride says the 42-year-old singer has no plans to tour beyond the 34 Lilith dates.

"A lot of fans think Sarah's going to tour outside of Lilith -- she's not, there are no plans," McBride said Thursday in a telephone interview from Vancouver. "I think there's people sitting there going, 'You know what, I'd rather go see Sarah play a two, two and a half hour long concert.'

"What they're missing is Sarah has two young daughters who are both in school. They're her No. 1 priority, as they should be. At this point, Sarah has no plans to tour outside of Lilith. I'm not saying that she won't, but there are no plans."

It's just one of the reasons McBride thinks ticket sales for the all-female music festival, set to relaunch after a dormant decade, have been slow.

Organizers have offered discounted seats in some cities while cancelling shows in Nashville and Phoenix outright and moving shows in Montreal, Edmonton and Vancouver to smaller venues.

McBride says ticket sales for the tour -- which will feature Mary J. Blige, Sheryl Crow and Queen Latifah on various dates, in addition to McLachlan -- were only one reason for the cancelled shows.

Tickets went on sale in Nashville while the city was dealing with a major flood and some of Lilith's artists are planning on taking part in benefit concerts there.

And McBride said the Canadian shows were not moved because of slow sales, but other reasons entirely (the inconvenient location of the original Vancouver venue, for instance, or concerns about chilly weather in Edmonton).

But mostly, McBride attributes the sluggish sales to a still-recovering economy in which concert tickets are a luxury many cannot afford.

"The whole summer's soft -- it's not just Lilith," he said. "We're in the middle of a recession. The interesting thing is we're stronger than most, but tickets are soft."

McBride said sales in the U.S. have been particularly slow.

"Stateside has definitely been hurt a lot more," he said. "Canada, I think, has been affected by the recession, America has been slammed by it."

And tickets to the show don't come cheaply.

For a spot at Sunday's opening show at McMahon Stadium in Calgary, tickets range between $66 and $277 including service fees.

But McBride said there wasn't much he could do to bring down the cost for the consumer.

"There's expensive tickets, and there's really cheap tickets," he said. "I would love to make the tickets cheaper, but it means the artists would have to demand less, and I'd have to get more sponsors. There's like an economic puzzle.

"We're not charging any more than what we need to charge to make it work."

Of course, the outlook isn't completely gloomy heading into Lilith's return.

McBride reports that Calgary's opening show is moving "very, very quickly" toward a sellout. He expects stops in Toronto and Vancouver to sell out too, and notes that fans seem to just be waiting longer than usual to buy tickets.

"We've sold more tickets in the last three days in the last 15 days," he said.

Still, he wouldn't rule out cancelling more dates.

"We look at this weekly," he replied. "I'm not going to say yes, I'm not going to say no."

McBride says even with this summer's challenges, Lilith will return again in 2011. But he'll consider the "lessons learned" this summer when planning Lilith's next trip.

"Well, I mean, if I could roll it back, I'd go, 'OK, do I really want to do 35 marketplaces?" he said. "Do I want to start off a little bit smaller? I definitely would've looked at that. ...

"(But) Lilith will probably end up being the most successful tour -- festival-wise -- this summer. Even with all of the issues and the uphill climb that we're facing. That's the reality of it."