Canadian Music Week

Canadian Music Week made the most sense after six in the evening, when the music industry began leaking out of hotel conference rooms and dispersing across Toronto. An executive who had spent the morning discussing rights, radio or streaming might end the night inside a few-hundred-capacity club watching an unsigned band. Artists could find themselves performing for ordinary fans, managers, journalists, agents and other musicians without knowing exactly who was standing at the back of the room. That mixture made CMW fundamentally different from a conventional festival. There was no field capable of containing the whole experience and no main stage that could summarise it. Toronto itself was the venue, and the possibility of discovering something early was part of the attraction.

It did not begin as a festival at all. In the early 1980s, David Farrell and Patricia Dunn-Farrell were publishing The Record, a Canadian music-industry trade paper built around a business then heavily dependent on radio, labels, retail, promotion and personal relationships. The publication developed an industry conference, and Neill Dixon became involved early, initially organising speakers and panels before becoming a partner. For years the gathering existed alongside the Juno Awards and remained primarily a professional meeting place. The element that would eventually define the public experience arrived in 1991, when a live showcase festival was added. Industry people could now spend the day talking about new music and the night standing in front of the artists themselves.

That transition was not effortless. The 1991 conference travelled with the Junos to Vancouver and lost substantial money, reinforcing the argument that Toronto was the natural centre of the event’s business network. During the early 1990s Dixon eventually took control and Canadian Music Week emerged as its fully developed identity. Separating from the Junos allowed the event to choose its own place in the calendar and turn Toronto into a destination rather than following an awards show around the country. The conference remained essential, but the live programme expanded until clubs, theatres and concert halls across the city effectively became a distributed festival site.

CMW’s geography was therefore something visitors assembled by walking, riding transit and making continual decisions. Horseshoe Tavern, Lee’s Palace, El Mocambo, Rivoli, The Opera House, Phoenix Concert Theatre and many other Toronto rooms appeared across different eras. The festival did not build a temporary city because Toronto already possessed the infrastructure it needed. On a busy night, numerous showcases happened simultaneously. Missing something was unavoidable. So was the possibility of abandoning the schedule after a recommendation from somebody encountered at a panel, a reception, another concert or the queue outside a venue. Discovery was not merely a programming category; it was a practical consequence of navigating too much music.

That structure gave emerging artists particular importance. In its largest years CMW presented hundreds and sometimes close to a thousand performers. The number could be overwhelming, but the concentration of industry changed what a small show could mean. Managers, A&R teams, booking agents, promoters, radio programmers, journalists and festival buyers were all temporarily gathered in the same city. A showcase guaranteed nothing, yet it could compress months of emails and introductions into one performance. Artists who later became globally recognised passed through the same ecosystem as thousands who remained underground. The uncertainty mattered. A room could contain a future headliner, or simply a remarkable act almost nobody outside it would ever see again.

During the day, Canadian Music Week increasingly became an institution inside the business itself. Panels on touring, publishing, radio, management, technology, sync and rights sat alongside awards, keynote conversations and networking. The Indies, Live Music Industry Awards, Canadian Sync Awards and later Radiodays North America became part of a layered programme. Fans could experience CMW principally as concerts; artists could use it as a marketplace; executives treated it as a conference; Toronto experienced it as a temporary intensification of its live-music network. At one stage the organisation described more than a thousand performers across more than sixty venues and over three thousand international delegates, numbers almost impossible to comprehend from any one club.

The final edition under the Canadian Music Week name ran June 1–8, 2024. More than 250 acts appeared across more than twenty-five Toronto venues. Walk Off The Earth, Charlotte Day Wilson, TESTPILOT, Jauz, Dallas Smith, KILLY, Tekno, Allie X and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram demonstrated how little interest CMW had in narrowing itself to one style. The conference operated from The Westin Harbour Castle while showcases spread through the city. Yet the most consequential announcement of the week happened away from a stage: Neill Dixon retired after more than four decades, and Loft Entertainment and Oak View Group acquired the event.

By November, it was clear that the new owners were planning more than cosmetic renovation. Canadian Music Week would no longer be the principal name. In May 2025, Departure Festival + Conference debuted as an explicit reimagining of CMW, carrying music forward while adding comedy, technology, food and a broader creative-industry mandate. Departure returned in 2026, proving that the new identity was not a temporary experiment. Canadian Music Week should therefore not be remembered as simply cancelled. It was transformed. For decades it trained an industry to spend daylight discussing where music was going and its nights walking through Toronto trying to hear the answer. What ended after 2024 was the name under which that ritual had become familiar.