Everyone is welcome at M for Montreal, but the audience targeted by the event has always been professionals from Europe and the United States, invited to discover talent from here. This is its mission: to bring in decision-makers from the musical world — almost 300 this year — and convince them to work with the artists on display.
This will be even more true on Friday evening, when the organization deprives the general public of its “100% free” outdoor concert, Le Show-Frette, moved to three different bars reserved for accredited professionals due to the recent snowfall. Eight artists were to parade on two stages set up under the Van Horne viaduct.
This ten centimeters of snow has the effect of a tile falling on the head of the organization of M for Montreal, which failed to find a room large enough to accommodate both the announced artists, the professionals as well as the public. A regrettable situation which, incidentally, illustrates the climate reigning these days within the music entertainment industry, cooled by economic conditions.
“Filling a Club Soda is difficult”
Co-founder of Costume Records and member of the group Barry Paquin Roberge, which appeared on Show-Frette, Sébastien Paquin has just returned from Berlin, where he accompanied Flore Laurentienne (composer Mathieu David Gagnon) as an agent. “We did four concerts in Germany, which is not much,” he explains. Normally, when we tour, we try to do at least ten dates. We had a bit of difficulty organizing our four shows – it was the funthe theaters were full, but financially, it put us under pressure” due to lower fees and production costs which increase with inflation.
Bar shows, as well as big arena productions like Blink-182’s tour, are doing well, but everything in between is struggling.
At the scheduled time of our conversation, Sébastien Paquin was just finishing a meeting with an American turner invited by M for Montreal in anticipation of Barry Paquin Roberge’s next tour. In the conferences organized by the event, the difficulties of the musical spectacle feed the backstage conversations, confirms Paquin.
“The current context is delicate,” he admits. The bands playing in the bars are doing pretty well, I think the audience needs to party a bit, but we’re talking about $10, $15 or $20 tickets. My reading of the current situation is that shows in bars, as well as major productions in arenas, such as the Blink-182 tour, are doing well, but everything in between in tear off “, even established Quebec groups which, before the pandemic, filled large rooms without difficulty. “I hear horror stories about big projects struggling to sell tickets. Fill a Club Soda [900 personnes debout] today, it is made difficult. »
Network
If the established groups encounter difficulties, one can only imagine the situation of developing artists, who, like Virginie B, represent the majority of the musicians participating in M for Montreal. The singer-songwriter, who launched her tasty first album of exploratory and bilingual pop songs last January, INSULA — in the running for Lucien for Pop Album of the Year at the GAMIQ on November 27 —, nevertheless dreams of better days.
“I did my first Francos with this project, it’s over the top! she says. We made contacts over the last year, I can’t wait to be able to travel around the world to play my songs. I know I have what it takes to get there, it’s a big dream I have, to meet a new audience, new people to hear the album — I know, it’s cliché to say, but that’s it. »
Virginie B, who will be heard in “Session live” at CISM on November 24, at 7 p.m., is at her first participation in M for Montreal, and observes from a distance her small team forging professional ties during the showcase event. : “It’s networking! I see the number of cocktails and meeting events where the world talks, and it impresses me. It’s really a very small world, where everyone seems to know each other, everyone wants to know each other and is very friendly. It’s all very foreign to me…”