North by Northeast

North by Northeast (or NXNE) is an annual music and arts festival held each June in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The festival’s main focus has always been live music, but it also includes a film festival, a comedy festival, art components, and a digital interactive media conference. In 2014, NXNE marked its 20th consecutive year with over 1,000 music performers and an overall attendance of 350,000. The 2015 edition of NXNE ran for five days, June 17–21.

NXNE began in 1995, patterned on the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. It has since grown from a three-day discovery festival of mainly local, unsigned, independent artists into a marquee event on Toronto’s entertainment calendar and a cornerstone of North America’s annual festival circuit.

Music

Each year, NXNE Music presents hundreds of bands from Canada, the United States and all over the world at over 50 Toronto music venues. Most venues host six bands a night (from 9 p.m. onward). The festival takes over Toronto’s downtown core, with many venues grouped along Queen Street West, College Street, and the Bloor Street Annex. NXNE Music is recognized as a key platform for emerging artists, and as an opportunity for fans to see hotly tipped “buzz bands” at small club venues. With the addition of a series of free outdoor concerts at Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto, NXNE in recent years has also presented as part of the festival internationally famous headline acts such as The Flaming Lips, Ludacris, Devo, Iggy and the Stooges, Billy Talent, Social Distortion, Raekwon & Ghostface Killah, De La Soul, Bad Religion, The Squids, Stars, The Pharcyde, The Raveonettes, GZA, Descendents, Digable Planets, K-os, and more.