Canadian Music Week singing the right tune
OK, Canadian Music Week, the door’s open. Wide open.
Before I go any further, however, a preface: I am friendly with parties on both sides of the old Canadian Music Week (CMW)/North by Northeast (NXNE) divide — you can’t help but become friendly with parties from within every inch of the Canadian music industry after writing about it for 20 years — so if I have a vested interest in either of these venerable Toronto festivals, it’s in seeing them both continue to do well for themselves. Now that NXNE 2016 has opted to do away with the festival model it originally borrowed from its Austinbased big brother, South by Southwest, 22 years ago and to anchor itself in the Port Lands rather than fanning out across myriad downtown venues, though, Canadian Music Week is well placed to become the definitive Toronto club crawl neither event could properly become when there were two of them on the calendar. The competition between CMW and NXNE has always, by and large, been a friendly one, and they’ve typically catered to different niches — CMW more to the industry-conference side of things, NXNE more to the average concertgoer — but they definitely did compete. Visiting acts were forced to choose between one or the other, meaning neither ever really had the “oomph” and volume of a monster industry gathering like SXSW. Many observers, myself included, have publicly wondered over the years why the two events didn’t simply swallow their pride and merge into a single “super-festival.”
All of a sudden, bands don’t have to choose anymore. If they want to play an industry gathering where business is done on the label, radio and retail side, CMW is the one. It’s now actually well placed to become the Toronto version of SXSW we’ve never quite had while NXNE does away with the music-convention aspect and reinvents itself as a more conventional, if still new-music-focused, festival. The opportunity to grow CMW into something bigger and better than it’s ever been after 34 years as a brand is tremendous.
“Absolutely, there’s a distinct difference now,” concurs co-founder Neill Dixon. “So hopefully we won’t be compared as we have in the past. We’ve sort of got that (format) locked up. And because we’ve been at it so long, we attract so many international visitors. We’re one of the international stops on the conference circuit. We’re pretty well established. So I think that’s good. It’s good for us, for sure.”
Dixon says CMW isn’t about to lose its industry focus, but agrees there’s room to grow on the musicfestival side, which often seemed a bit of an afterthought during the event’s earlier years.
To that end, Dixon has in recent years populated the CMW office with younger blood — “I’m the oldest person here,” he quips — such as current music programmer Cameron Wright to sex it up a bit and make its public face a bit more relevant. There’s “a concerted effort” being made to reinvent Canadian Music Week to fit the contemporary realities of “Music City” Toronto, too, and the people who stand to benefit from that reinvention the most are Toronto music fans, who could soon have a gigantic, citywide party on their hands each May.
And thank mercy it’s May, not March anymore. CMW moving to May last year was the smartest thing it’s ever done.
“That was the turning point, re- ally,” says Dixon. “We were 14 years in lockstep with the Junos.
“And then they started moving around the country and we didn’t start moving around the country, but we stayed in that time spot. I don’t know why, but we did. So that was kind of ridiculous. It’s, like, ‘What was I thinking?’
“A few blizzards later, it was torture. All the internationals were going: ‘Why would you have a conference in Canada in the winter? What the hell are you thinking?’
“So anyway, that seems so obvious in hindsight.”
Better to learn slowly than to not learn at all.
Keep your eyes on Canadian Music Week. It could be a very different beast in a couple of years if it plays its cards right.