Checking the pulse on Calgary’s music strategy
Nadoo Abaagu, Contributor |
In 2024, the music advocacy organisation West Anthem released a strategy for making Calgary a bona fide music city.
The plan was to nurture, highlight, and, most importantly, promote Calgary’s music industry. It’s been two years since that report, but has the plan borne any fruit?
The Mastering of a Music City, a 2015 report released by Music Canada and IFPI, describes a music city as “communities of various sizes that have a vibrant music economy which they actively promote.”
The definition is vague because no two music cities look the same. Each city is filled with a unique convergence of artists, but the one thing that is the same across music landmarks around the globe is big business.
According to the Canadian Live Music Association, the Canadian live music industry and live music tourism generated close to $11 billion in GDP in 2023. It employed over 100,000 people and contributed $5.84 billion in Canadian labour income.
Beyond the economy, music cities also contribute to community life and individual wellbeing.
“Music has a role—and everyone already knows this instinctively—of bringing people together, creating conversations, and sometimes facilitating understanding and compromise between people who have different cultural backgrounds,” said Andrew Mosker, president and CEO of the National Music Centre and co-founder of West Anthem, in a statement to Nuvo Magazine.
Most of the benefits of Canada’s music industry have been concentrated in Ontario. The city has the largest music industry in Canada and remains its music capital.
Still, the benefits to Alberta and Calgarians are clear to West Anthem. To build a music city in Calgary, they called for a union between audiences, infrastructure and government support.
Mosker, speaking to the Calgary Herald, emphasised the importance of Calgarians supporting their music economy.
“When friends come to town, instead of only taking them to Banff, [we should say] ‘we have an incredible music scene here, an incredible music district, I’m going to take you down here because you need to see this part of town.’”
West Anthem’s vision for Calgary is one where the city attracts artists and nurtures local talent and where music contributes to the economy and the health of communities. It’s a version of Calgary where artists can both work and live in the city, but just how close has Calgary gotten to that vision?
West Anthem reports many successful strides. The organisation has engaged in advocacy in Alberta tourism and worked with government agencies to push funding forward.
In 2025, Calgary was selected as the host city for the 2026 Music Cities Convention, and the Alberta Music Cities Grant program distributed $76,350 to 9 experimental music projects primarily in Calgary and Edmonton.
One special recipient of the program was the independent live music festival, East Town Get Down. The festival takes place across multiple venues in East Calgary. This project received $9,270 to build partnerships with Alberta-based events and create performance opportunities outside of the festival.
Tourism Calgary has also begun to define Calgary according to its arts and culture.
The newly launched Blue Sky City tourism campaign has created opportunities to fund and promote Calgary artists and the city’s music scene through projects like the Blue Sky City Creative Challenge.
Still, for everyday Calgarians and artists, the city has not tangibly changed, with live music venues continuing to decline.
Between 2020 and 2023, Calgary lost many music venues because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the future of live music venues remains volatile, according to a 2025 Calgary Cultural Spaces Infrastructure Report.
Nonetheless, attendance across many of Calgary’s largest music festivals remains very high. The Calgary Stampede welcomed over 1.4 million guests in 2026, while the Calgary Folk Festival entertained over 50,000 attendees.
But for smaller festivals and venues, the consumer cost-of-living crisis, infrastructure ownership challenges and noise bylaws are hard to overcome.
In June, the 2026 Country Thunder Music Festival in Calgary was cancelled just days before the festivities were set to start. The organisation claimed a loss in key infrastructure and restrictive noise bylaws made it impossible to continue the festival.
Despite these current problems in Calgary, Alberta is still looking to expand music opportunities across the province.
At the end of April, the Government of Alberta released its first-ever Alberta Music Action Plan. The document is shaped by West Anthem’s 2024 recommendations and a roundtable held in October 2024.
The Alberta Music Action Plan outlines how Alberta will nurture talent, foster industry connections, remove barriers to funding and amplify Alberta artists on the world stage.
“Together, we are tuning up Alberta’s music sector to hit all the right notes,” said Tanya Fir, Alberta minister of arts, culture and status of women, in the report.
“Our government is committed to supporting and investing in creators and visionaries to bring more music business to Alberta and share the talent of Alberta’s music sector with a world audience.”
