Toronto Live! Chronicles

 

Canadian Music Week - Post-Mortem
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Another year, another wrist band to retire!

I like to wrap up my coverage of Canadian Music Week with a few general thoughts about the event, and compare it with previous years.

First and foremost, we had outstanding weather!  There's many a year that I was slogging from one venue to the next in a blizzard, ankle deep slush or under a downpour of rain unlike any I've ever seen in Toronto. Bad weather can be a real buzz kill, when you want to stop by several venues in the same evening. Definitely not a problem this year!

Wristbands were up to $75 for the complete CMF event this year. $35 for a one day wristband.  I can't say that that's necessarily excessive, because most venues I visited were busy. 

But on the other hand, I saw less people than usual coming in wearing wristbands.  A lot of venues were only charging a $5 cover at the door if they still had capacity. So, for the same price as a one-day wristband, you could visit 7 of those venues and see as many acts in each of them as you wanted too. Or just pay $5 and stay put in one place for the night.

I'm sure that the Canadian Music Week's market research team has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the market will bear the higher prices; but if in fact they don't have a market research team at all, they should definitely recruit some talent on that front before next year.  Remember, that it was only about five years ago when the full-event wristband was $35. The claim that two days have been added to the event doesn't cut it… because, let's face it, there really isn't much happening on Wednesday and Sunday nights. It's still a 3-day CMF. 

I took in one of the (sister event) Comedy Fest shows this year, and enjoyed it; but that's outside of the scope of the CMF wristband. Individual shows were in the $60-80 range for most comedy nights.

Did I enjoy myself and discover some new and interesting bands that I'd go see again?  Absolutely!  That's why festivals like this are so important…  relative to festivals where you simply count up the names of bands you've heard on the radio in order to decide whether to go or not.  CMF is all about exposure to new bands that you might really like… bands that may never make it to commercial radio play. (Commercial radio is a dinosaur distribution medium anyway, that should have disappeared 20 years ago!).  

So, I'm already looking forward to next year's Canadian Music Week, and in particular the Canadian Music Fest subset.  I'll have to admit though, that the next competitive event on a similar scale, North by North East (NXNE), is coming up in June.  It's time to start planning for that one!
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