Two festivals, two solitudes.

Canadian Music Week and North by Northeast have coexisted peacefully — albeit while observing a healthy yet friendly rivalry — a mere three months apart since 1995, when NXNE first launched as a scrappy, young beginning-of-summer counterpart to the more industry-centric CMW.

This year, however, the two events have been nudged considerably more tightly together. CMW has relocated from its typical perch in mid-March to run from May 6 to 10, less than six weeks before NXNE’s June 13 start. It’s a rather ballsy move that raises a couple of questions:

1. Can Toronto sustain two music festival/conferences of this size — both drawing upon essentially the same contemporary pop-music talent pool and populating the same swath of local live-music venues, from the Horseshoe and Lee’s Palace on up to Kool Haus and Sound Academy — in such close proximity on the calendar?

2. And isn’t it perhaps time for Canadian Music Week and North by Northeast to finally bury the hatchet and work together as one gigantic super-festival?

The answers, apparently, are a resounding yes and a resounding no, although perhaps not quite as resounding a no as you might think from CMW president Neill Dixon. But more on that later.

What do you think?

For the moment, Toronto seems to be sustaining the two festivals just fine. CMW’s numbers, says Dixon, are “very good” heading into this year’s conference. And while the well-connected, schmoozy industry conference, not the live-music component, has traditionally been CMW’s bread and butter throughout its 32-year history, the festival side — which has snagged some hot-ticket gigs by Neko Case, Mastodon, City and Colour and No Age — looks to benefit from the walk-up business it doesn’t typically get when it’s -14C outside and the streets are being lashed with snow. Last year, CMW boasted 1,200 bands and 100,000 attendees.

NXNE co-founder, president and managing director (and Now magazine publisher) Michael Hollett, for his festival’s part, credits this year’s whopping lineup, which has some impressive “gets” in the likes of Spoon, Spiritualized, St. Vincent and Future Islands, for ticket sales already “so far ahead of last year it’s crazy.” NXNE’s outgoing figures last year had its attendance at 1,000 bands and 350,000 concertgoers, 145,000 of those passing through its four outdoor shows at Yonge-Dundas Square alone.

So they’re both doing okay. But, seriously, have they ever considered a merger? Combining their reach, their contacts, their reputations and their buying power into a potentially much larger entity? To many outside observers — this music writer included — the idea has made a lot of sense for years.

“Never even slightly,” says Hollett. “I guess the most telling thing is (Dixon) moved his event closer to mine, I didn’t move mine closer to his. I wish him well. I do. Obviously we do business together — he’s a big supporter of Now magazine — but we have a different vision. And there’s room for many different visions in this city. I just think we’re different. We have different motivations and different goals.”

North by Northeast’s first slogan was “it’s for the music,” he says, and the festival’s focus — in the model of its minority partner, the hallowed South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex. — remains very much on taking new artists and new music to the people. It’s an extension, of sorts, of Now’s ethos of bringing “alternative ideas and alternative culture to a larger world.”

Canadian Music Week, on the other hand, is very much a place where business gets done, where international music-biz movers and shakers convene to wheel and deal behind the scenes. Most of the bands who fly in from outside Toronto to play the festival tend to have very specific reasons to be there and very specific people to see.

“The whole purpose of CMW has always been the industry delegation,” observes music programmer Cameron Wright. “I think NXNE has always produced a really amazing event and a real party vibe . . . whereas CMW has always really been more about bands who have a plan and bands who want to achieve something. I mean, we’ll give you a concert at night and we’ll put people in that room — and that’s been proven to happen for 30-plus years, even in snowstorms — but the bands who are taking part in CMW are really interested in the conference.”

Ideologically, then, the two events do stand somewhat apart.

Canadian Music Week only moved to May, says Dixon, because the one thing conference-goers have consistently complained about for three decades is the weather.

CMW originally set up shop early in the year to tie into the Juno Awards, but that has made increasingly little sense since the Junos abandoned the Toronto/Hamilton corridor in 2002 and began roaming around to different cities across the country. The final straw, then, came when a recent impact study asked people: “If you could change anything about Canadian Music Week, what would that be?”

“Almost to a tee, every one of them said ‘Move it to a nicer time of year’ or ‘Move it to a time when you can do outdoor concerts’ or whatever,” says Dixon. “So that kind of struck home. These are our ticket buyers, our wristband buyers, the fans as opposed to the industry. We’ve got to listen to them. So we made the decision to move. We’re not locked into this date, but we’re going to test drive it.”

The May dates were chosen to get a jump on Toronto’s jammed summer festival and conference season — from a logistical standpoint, it was tough just finding a host hotel available to accommodate CMW for five days — and “because it did the least damage around the world competing with people.” As it stands, it’s still right up against Brighton, England’s Great Escape festival.

Moving to the fall was considered, too, but as Dixon notes, the Toronto International Film Festival “takes over September for two weeks and then you’re getting on into October, so now you’re getting into the start of winter.”

“North by Northeast might feel we’re encroaching on them, but I’ve talked to Michael and we basically said we’re going to try to live in the same sandbox and try to maybe work a little closer,” says Dixon, who’s actually quite amenable to the suggestion that perhaps the two festivals should join forces. “We’ve always been a little competitive, so that thought’s never crossed anybody’s mind. But seriously, that would make it one super festival. That would be pretty enviable.”

Or how about just piggybacking the two events on each other?

CMW could bring its wealth of global connections and top-tier speakers — this year has Quincy Jones, Nile Rodgers and Diane Warren alone — for the business-minded, while NXNE could put the music out there on the streets and stimulate intellectual discussion with its growing “Interactive” component. Surely you might have the seeds of a SXSW-sized monstrosity there, no? We’re officially twinned with much smaller Austin now in a “music-city alliance,” after all; they’re making us look bad.

“Well, that might be an option, too,” chuckles Dixon. “Yeah, absolutely. I’m open to that kind of thinking, sure, especially since we’re trying to build Toronto as a music city and make it a destination. That would certainly make a bigger impact and you could probably get more support for that.

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“It’s not in our three-year business plan, but I’d be happy to discuss that over a brandy at midnight.”

No one seems terribly concerned that CMW and NXNE are now at such close quarters, in any case.

The main sticking point, judging from a casual survey of Toronto managers, agents, label folk and the like is simply that now their acts can only play one festival.

North by Northeast has a 45-day radius clause “to make sure we’re now going to have a different festival,” says co-founder and co-programmer Yvonne Matsell, although that’s pretty standard for most festivals. CMW observes a similar policy for “contracted headliners,” says Wright, but allows other participants the option of doing whatever they want.

“It’s unfortunate that the two are so close together,” comments Shauna de Cartier, head of Six Shooter Records. “Where you used to be able to use both festivals as a launching pad for a new artist, now you have to choose between the two. But other than that, I don’t really have a preference between the two. Both are really great. It’s actually a bigger issue for us that CMW and the Great Escape fall on the same weekend this year.”

Jeffrey Remedios of local indie powerhouse Arts & Crafts feels much the same way.

“Now that they are closer together I would say, as a generalization, that it depends on our goals for a specific artist,” he says. “CMW tends to be more industry focused. . . . They also bring in a lot of international music delegates, which can be helpful.

“NXNE is far more consumer facing. The city embraces NXNE, gets excited and gets engaged. There’s real value in that, too.”

There’s not much appetite for a merger out there amongst those players with something at stake, either.

In fact, local promoter Dan Burke — who stages his popular NeXT festival-within-a-festival at CMW and NXNE each year — thinks the calendar could stand even more of the same.

“I’m totally opposed to a merger and I’m sure the festivals are,” he emails. “Montreal has countless music festivals and Toronto isn’t just Canada’s capital of live music — it’s one of the world’s, especially in indie rock. So we should have more than two festivals.

“But there should be a bit more breathing room between them. Especially with May and June being the two months now. There’s already too many concerts in May without a festival. But let’s see what happens.”

Chris Taylor, entertainment lawyer and founder of Last Gang Records, doesn’t think a merger would make sense, either, “as the culture and focus of both festivals are very different.”

“However, having them so close together is not ideal for either of them, I would suspect,” he adds. “March was a tough month to survive a festival here. On the back of SXSW and with the winter weather up here it was sometimes an exhausting and cold week. I think it’d be awesome if CMW was in September. Maybe put up close to Pop Montreal and CMJ.”

However it plays out this year, Matsell is correct when she notes that “people have definitely got an influx of great music to deal with over the next couple of months.”

“Despite my competitive nature, this city’s so big it can absorb a lot of culture,” offers Hollett, whose festival is already flanked by Luminato and the TD Toronto Jazz Festival, anyway. “There’s room for everything.”