Live Music Toronto: New Indie Trade Association Launches for North America's Top Music Market

Toronto, one of the largest music markets in North America, has a brand-new organization to aid the sector, aptly named Live Music Toronto.

Created by the Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA), in partnership with MusicOntario, after a series of meetings and focus groups, Live Music Toronto (LMT) is modelled on America’s National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), the UK’s Music Venue Trust, and Quebec’s Les SMAQ in the Canadian province.

CIMA and MusicOntario also looked to the acclaimed study, Reimagining Music Venues (2023), co-authored by Prof. Daniel Silver, Department of Sociology and School of Cities, at University of Toronto; and Jonathan Bunce, Wavelength Music Arts Projects.

An earlier study, by the City of Toronto, 2020’s Re:Venues, found that local venues generate an estimated CAD$850 million ($679.2M) in annual economic impact and support the equivalent of 10,500 full-time jobs.

Live Music Toronto aims to provide community, strategy, resources and advocacy for independent and grassroots venues, festivals, promoters, and presenters. It will act as a collective voice on local policy with a long-term goal of ensuring sustainability of the live spaces where artists traditionally develop.

Jonny Dovercourt, co-founder of the non-profit festival and events company Wavelength Music, is the day-to-day point person.

Founded in 1975, CIMA is the not-for-profit national trade association representing over 700 Canadian-owned music companies connected to over 6,000 artists and music industry workers across the country. Live Music Toronto is a new tier of membership in CIMA. CIMA president and CEO Andrew Cash tells Pollstar there are 45 members, to date.

In its first-year, ticketing company Tixr is on board as a sponsor to help defer the cost of membership. Members must be independent, grassroots venues, promoters, presenters and festivals; Canadian-owned; Canadian-controlled; operating in Toronto and outside of the major institutional ecosystem; and not owned or operated by the municipal, provincial or federal governments.

Cash spoke with Pollstar about LMT’s creation, purpose and goals.

Pollstar: We’ve got the CLMA and the municipal government has The Toronto Music Office (run by Mike Tanner, music sector development officer). What prompted the need for Live Music Toronto? Andrew Cash: The Music Office in Toronto is an excellent and excellently run office and resource for music in Toronto. The space that Live Music Toronto will occupy is more of an outside force of advocacy, pushing into the municipality, into the City of Toronto, in ways that you can’t do when you’re already inside. Political advocacy that isn’t in the remit of the Toronto Music Office, but is in the remit of CIMA, and will be part of what Live Music Toronto does.

We can help push some of the micro changes, which seem small sometimes, but for local entrepreneurs who are trying to run clubs in the city or who are trying to do small events, or larger events, these small things are a big deal. Like, the way bands load in, and the difficulties with just that, if you’re a band and you don’t want your gear stolen or a parking ticket, or worse, a tow.

And, CLMA does phenomenal work around the value of music and we reference their study. CIMA understands that we can’t be everywhere and there are provincial associations, which do a lot of work that feeds into CIMA, and the work that CIMA does feeds into some of the provincial associations. So, I feel very confident that this is going to be a really good addition to the excellent work that CLMA does. We’ll be able to help amplify each other’s work and coordinate and work together on a number of issues too.

What’s first on the agenda? For independent Canadian-owned venues and promoters and presenters and DIY grassroots promoters and presenters and venues in the city of Toronto, specifically, there’s a lot of local work to do that we think we can help with. One of those is connecting those people to each other. And, also, connecting them all to the other membership communities that we have inside the CIMA tent. It’s something that is already starting to happen

Mike Tanner has said that government acts slow, but since the Toronto Music Office was created in 2014, there have been some important changes: free permits for concerts in the park for 200 people, allowing amplified music on patios, and decibel specificity in the noise bylaw verses anyone who complains wins.

And reducing the municipal tax by 50% for live venues.

That too. Mike comes from our world. He’s a musician, whose last job was as director of operations at NXNE, before working for the City of Toronto. Do you think Live Music Toronto will give him more ammo to push through changes?  I look forward to us working on initiatives. We will likely find that we work very well together. The Music Office already supports so many initiatives in the city, including ones that CIMA does and Music Ontario does.  What’s interesting about the Music Office that is somewhat similar to CIMA and Music Ontario is that his perch, like ours, is very much a macro perch, where he’s seeing the ecosystem and he’s trying to, with the resources he has, and the remit that he has, to help build a sustainable ecosystem in Toronto for music, which is what we’re all trying to accomplish our different lanes, including CLMA and the Music Publishers Association, and all the provincial associations, and our partner on this, Music Ontario.

Music Venue Trust is doing such a great job from protecting grassroots venues from developers to carbon footprint concerns. Are there things you are looking to do here? I interviewed [CEO] Mark Davyd from the Music Venue Trust at the Wavelength Conference a couple of months ago and was so impressed by him and the work that they’ve done and the accomplishments that they’ve made. We’re certainly interested in that work. Obviously, Toronto and Canada are different from London and the UK, but there’s some interesting things there.  It’s early days for Live Music Toronto.

We have some specific things we’d like to tackle, but as we move forward in broader strokes, we’ll be probably taking a strong look at some of the things that they’re doing around the ticketing contribution because everyone understands that if you’ve got a vibrant local music scene, it feeds up to the rest of the music sector. Over the years, there’s been an invisible barrier between the live music sector and the recorded music sector and it’s going to benefit all of us if we try to find ways to get more connected across those membership.

The accomplishments and the movements that have happened at the behest of the Toronto Music Office have actually been in many ways very rapid changes, if you think about how long that office has been in existence. There’s all sorts of reasons why governments move slow but that’s where the change happens and that’s why it’s so important to have a strong advocacy position, which is part of what CLMA does; it’s part of what CIMA has always done, and I think that Live Music Toronto can really target some specific issues, like the parking. There’s been a lot of confusion over some of the municipal licensing requirements that have changed, and so we hope to help our members and the City smooth some of that out so it’s a little less challenging for everyone.

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/06/15/live-music-toronto-citys-first-formal-indie-trade-association-launches/)._