Toronto Mayor Rob Ford will visit Austin, Texas in early October as part of an effort to foster deeper economic ties with the self-proclaimed Live Music Capital of the World.

“We’re going to Texas and it’s going to be exciting,” Ford told reporters Thursday. “And obviously we’re going to work closely with the music industry down there and see what sort of deals we can make, and it’s going to benefit, hopefully benefit all of Texas and all of Toronto.”

Toronto’s council unanimously endorsed a “Music City Alliance” with Austin in July. Austin’s council backed the initiative in June.

Details of the trip have not been released. Councillor Gary Crawford, a drummer, said the mayor will likely spend two or three days in Austin before and during the weekend of Oct. 5, while the Austin City Limits Music Festival is on. Ford will meet with Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell, Crawford said.

Councillor Josh Colle, who joined with Crawford to push for the alliance, said members of the to-be-determined Toronto delegation will also meet with the Austin chamber of commerce, tourist board, and local councillors. And he hopes they can take in some tunes at the festival — in the name of education.

“That’s part of the whole thing, to see how they do it in action on the ground. When I was there for South by Southwest, I was just blown away by the number of people that a city that size could draw in,” Colle said.

The trip will come just over a year after Ford led a business mission to Chicago, the only other international trip of his mayoralty to date. A proposed trip to Boston appears to have been abandoned.

The Toronto delegation to Austin will be much smaller than the delegation to Chicago. It will likely include Colle, Crawford, Ford, at least one senior city official, and industry representatives who planned to be in town anyway. The cost to taxpayers has not yet been determined; Ford himself plans to pay his own way, as he did in Chicago.

“What we’re trying to do from an economic development perspective is start increasing the strength of the music industry in Toronto,” Crawford said. “It has an economic impact of about $600 million to the city. We want to double that.”