Indie Week

A showcase festival with a conference attached, aimed squarely at artists rather than executives.

• Three days in November across Ottawa venues.
• More than 55 artists playing over three nights.
• Industry panels and networking running in the daytime alongside the shows.
• One of the smaller events in this directory, and small on purpose.

Neither — and both mix-ups are common enough to cost someone a flight.

• It is in Ottawa now. Indie Week ran in Toronto for years and most of what is written about it still says Toronto. Searching “Indie Week Toronto” returns nothing current — a sign of how recent the move is, not of the festival winding down.
• It is not A2IM Indie Week. That is a business conference for the US independent label sector, held every June in New York’s Times Square. Same name, no relationship.
• The tell: if you want label and distribution contacts, that is the New York one. If you want a stage, this is.

A showcase festival first, with a conference running around it.

• More than 55 artists over three nights across Ottawa venues.
• The conference side is panels and networking, not workshops or keynotes at scale. Value here is proportionate to how much you talk to people, not how many sessions you sit in.
• Applications open months ahead and have closed for 2026.
• The odds are considerably better than at large festivals. 55-plus slots against a submission pool far smaller than SXSW’s is the main practical argument for applying.

Open to attend, but the numbers are not published — and playing is a separate process entirely.

• Attending is open. No membership, no credentials, no qualification.
• Pass prices for 2026 were not published in a form I could verify when this page went up, which is why no figure appears in the panel above.
• Performing is by application, not by ticket. The window for the 2026 edition has closed.
• The trip is the cheap part. Ottawa in November is the least expensive destination in this directory by a distance — for an artist choosing between one showcase festival and none, that matters more than most rankings admit.

Book it if you are:

• An emerging artist who needs stage time in front of industry and a realistic chance of getting a slot. That combination is rarer than it sounds — most showcase festivals offer one or the other.
• Building a Canadian touring base. The contacts are Canadian promoters, agents and media, and that network is genuinely hard to reach from outside.
• A producer or engineer travelling with an artist you work with. There is less here for you independently.

Skip it if you are:

The cost argument is real though. Ottawa in November is the cheapest trip on this list by a distance, and for an artist choosing between one showcase festival and none, that matters more than most rankings admit.

None published — and I want to be precise about what that means.

• Applications had closed and the conference programme had not been announced when this page was written. No session titles, nothing to count.
• The rating reflects what is published, not a claim that the panels will ignore the subject.
• This is the one event here where I would not expect AI to be a focus even once the programme lands. The conference is built around early-career development — how to tour, how to get played, how to work with the Canadian industry.
• AI enters that conversation as a tool question, not as the rights and licensing fight that dominates the label-facing events.

If AI programming is what you are choosing on, this is not the trip: The NAMM Show has a named AI programme, SXSW runs the platform and policy argument at scale, and Music Tectonics is where the people building the tools discuss whether the economics work.

If stage time in front of Canadian industry is what you are choosing on, none of those three will do what this one does.