Q’s With Canadian Music Week’s GM & Festival Director Andrew Valle

With Canadian Music Week, Canada’s biggest industry conference and festival, kicking off next week, Pollstar caught up with Andrew Valle, the event’s GM and festival director, to get the lowdown on this year’s confab. In the process, we came to find out that Valle, at the tender age of 28, not only oversees much of the festival with the legendary Neill Dixon but his other job working as a manager with LOFT Entertainment is run by another Canadian industry heavyweight: Randy Lennox, who once headed UMG Canada and Bell Media. Here, Valle breaks down this year’s CMW, how he’s come so far in such a short time and how playing quarterback in the land of hockey helped his career.

Pollstar: What are some of this year’s CMW highlights? 

Andrew Valle: We kick off strong on June 1 with Deadmau5’s induction into the CMW Hall of Fame. He’s the first electronic artist to be inducted and performing at Rebel. We have Walk Off the Earth playing Bud Stage. On the second, Billboard Canada launches a power player list with an event at the CN Tower. On June 3, we start the conference with creators day and have the Sync Awards that night. Tuesday, we open the live music summit, covering touring agents, promoters, venues, ticketing. On the fifth, we have top executives at Spotify, Tiktok and the Recording Academy. The singer of Papa Roach is on a panel with the Maple Leafs goalie. The Live Music Awards are that night. Jake Gold is being inducted into the Hall of Fame and Marsha Vlasic is International Agent of the Year. The conference wraps Wednesday night. We have shows Thursday and the Jim Beam Indies Awards at the Danforth. Then Friday and Saturday we have strong festival shows.

How many people are you expecting?

We usually get about 3,000 delegates. We’re now in over 25 venues and over 300 artists at the festival. There’s so much talent in this country.

How long have you been at CMW?

I’ve been here five years. I climbed the company ladder from handling logistics on both the conference and festival side. 

Where were you before?

I’m 28. I started interning for Dine Alone Records, they have Alexisonfire, City and Colour and other big acts. I was mentored by their manager Joel Carriere. Then I went back to University of Waterloo to finish my last semester. There was this band that broke up called Stereos who hit me up and were like, “We wanna do a 10-year anniversary show.” CMW in May aligned. I believed in the band and put it in front of CMW and they didn’t back it because the band was on hiatus for so long they didn’t see the proof. So I did it myself out of my bedroom. It sold out two months before. Then CMW called and said, “Can we make this part of the festival?” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” It was a highlight of the festival. A couple of weeks later they had me in for a meeting, and I started working with them. The guy who actually said no to that show, I technically am him now, which is hilarious.

In this day and age, it’s hard to jump up the ladder as the business has become more professionalized.

I went directly to festival director because I was building great relationships with Live Nation, Embrace, INK, AEG, the big promoters in Toronto and with agents and showing them the value we could bring. Having all the promoters take the gloves off for a week is the best part. I take pride this year specifically if you look at the bottom of a festival poster, it’s Live Nation. Embrace, AEG, INK, RapSeason, Collective Concerts, MRG Live. Every promoter has a show and it didn’t used to be like that. I saw all these different promoters doing shows and there’s no point in competing with them. You might as well steer their tours to our week and beef up the week and keep an allocation of tickets for wristbands and everybody wins at the end of the day. 

And you also program panels? 

I program like 25 panels. Over time I’ve built relationships and at the same time had my own management company, which moved over to Randy Lennox’s LOFT Entertainment. I have my own roster and it’s like all boats rise — Randy’s interviewing Jeremy Erlich, global head of music at Spotify. Randy was president of Universal Canada and also president/CEO of Bell Media for a long time.  So my two bosses are Randy and Neill, so I don’t sleep much.

So your two bosses are legends of the Canadian music industry; what have you learned from them?

I’ve learned so many things. They have different perspectives. Neill goes back as
an entrepreneur, especially starting CMW over 40 years ago and Randy’s signed artists like The Weeknd, Drake and Shawn Mendez and artists of that caliber. I’ve learned so much about keeping a good reputation and always making sure we’re moving the right way and playing the political side. From Randy, I learned about not making snap decisions and to reflect before acting on things. Sometimes emotions can get the best of you. I played quarterback my whole life, so I’ve been in a mature leadership role since I was a kid. 

Wait, you played quarterback in Canada? 

Yeah, since I was a kid. I played a bit in the university, too. 

Isn’t it an apostasy in Canada to not play hockey? 

I played hockey too, but football took over. I learned a lot about maturity, discipline and teamwork from football. I always wanted to shoot high and do great things and especially teamwork, everyone has to want to win.

Going forward, how do you plan to grow and evolve CMW? 

We have a lot of plans. We want to do more with buyers and agents. CMW is the place to do business.