Arthur Fogel is at the top of the Leaderboard as Billboard Canada’s Power Player of the Year, but he’s not the only one at Live Nation making a big impact in the Canadian live music space. President Erik Hoffman led the national concert team in a year that included a record show count at Toronto’s Budweiser Stage and many of the biggest tours in North America at venues throughout the country. Hoffman has served as promoter for international acts like Zach Bryan and hometown star Drake, as well as domestic acts like Daniel Caesar, Sum 41 and Arkells. Chairman Riley O’Connor, meanwhile, was the tour promoter for the Bruce Springsteen Canadian tour and has been the lead promoter for Blue Rodeo for over three decades. Under their leadership, Live Nation has evolved by focusing on the growing markets of Latin and Punjabi music (focused on by Ricky Taco and Baldeep Randhawa), which included a record-breaking event by Indian superstar Diljit Dosanjh in Vancouver. And after a campaign from musicians, the company stopped taking merch cuts in 2023 and raised the minimum wage in its club venues. It hasn’t been without controversy though, as Live Nation’s big push into venue ownership (including recent acquisitions of historic independent venues the Opera House in Toronto and the KEE to Bala in Muskoka) has increased its market share to the point that many rival promoters are complaining they can’t compete.

Debra Rathwell (see leaderboard) isn’t the only Canadian with a big presence at AEG. Elliott Lefko, a 40-year-veteran of Canadian and American music promotion, is the North American tour promoter for some big-deal veteran bands including Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Kraftwerk, Sigur Ros and MGMT. As one of the largest promoters in the world, AEG is also responsible for tours by major artists including Zach Bryan, ATEEZ and more — including a co-promoter agreement for the Taylor Swift Eras Tour.

In Toronto, where fans are loyal to the local hockey team no matter how long their Stanley Cup drought lasts, MLSE holds significant prominence and power. The company, which owns the Maple Leafs and Raptors as well as a handful of other teams, is a major player in the concert scene through its ownership of Scotiabank Arena and Coca-Cola Coliseum and partnership with Live Nation. Melissa Bubb-Clarke is a senior leader overseeing programming and production in the company’s live entertainment sector, and she plays a big role in Scotiabank Arena’s status as an unmissable stop on most major artists’ North American tours, from Queen to Nas, Olivia Rodrigo to Noah Kahan. Bubb-Clarke, who also leads MLSE’s Music Sponsorship Agency, boasts record-setting show counts and revenues in a year that included a big renovation of Scotiabank Arena. Owned by the country’s two biggest telecom conglomerates, Rogers and Bell, MLSE gets some local cred for its decade-long partnership with Drake and OVO, marked by a transformation of Scotiabank Arena into “October’s Very Own Arena” for the hometown rapper’s 2023 “It’s All a Blur” tour stop. This year, Bubb-Clarke also wrapped up her tenure as a board member of CARAS, the not-for-profit behind The Juno Awards, and its music education organization MusiCounts.

The largest independent promoter, producer and broadcaster in Canada is a Quebec company, evenko, a member of Groupe CH under the leadership of France Margaret Bélanger (see leaderboard). Each year, evenko, in particular thanks to the decades-long knowledge of the music industry of Nick Farkas and Daniel Glick, produces 1,600 events throughout Quebec, but also in the Atlantic provinces and in the north-eastern United States. evenko is behind Osheaga, îLESONIQ, LASSO Montréal, HEAVY Mtl and ’77 Montréal and manages the Bell Centre and Place Bell arenas, as well as the emblematic MTELUS, Beanfield Theatre, Manuvie Theatre and Club Dix30 venues. Supervised by Farkas and Glick, Osheaga was a sold-out event this year with some 155,000 festival-goers coming to applaud Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish, Charlotte Cardin and Carly Rae Jepsen, among others, over three days. The country music festival LASSO Montréal doubled ticket sales between its first and second edition to reach 65,000 spectators in 2023. As for the Bell Centre, the home of the Montreal Canadiens, it continues to host concerts from stars like Noah Kahan, Olivia Rodrigo and more.

Ticketmaster is the top ticketing agent in Canada, as it is in the U.S. Patti-Anne Tarlton’s role at Ticketmaster Global is primarily focused on expanding across international markets, but she says “equally important is the health of the live music industry (commercially and people-wise) in each local market, including Canada.” She’s very involved in a number of Canadian industry advisories and boards, including as a founding board member of the Canadian Live Music Association (an important advocacy organization during the industry’s bounceback from the pandemic) and WISE Toronto (Women in Sports and Events), and she’s the chair of the Music Forward Foundation “all with a through line to advantage the industry while growing opportunities and normalizing more equitable outcomes for the next generation of industry professionals reflective of the diverse communities we live in and serve.”

Country is one of the hottest genres in North America, and Brooke Dunford at Republic Live is helping to turn up the heat. Republic Live’s Boots and Hearts festival brings in 40,000 people per night annually and has shown power in breaking country artists: the Boots & Hearts Emerging Artist Showcase has helped launch the careers of stars like The Reklaws, Jade Eagleson and 2022 winner and Universal Music signee Owen Riegling, all of whom are country radio and country chart mainstays. Dunford has built a reliable marquee venture, but isn’t comfortable playing it safe. Last year, she made a risky call by booking rock group Nickelback as the headliners at a country festival — it turned out to be a trendsetting success, with Nickelback since playing other country festivals across the continent. This year, Republic Live announced two ambitious new endeavours: the company launched a new pop-punk focused festival, All Your Friends Fest, and a Nashville-based management wing, RLive, with Emerging Showcase alumni Tyler Joe Miller as the first client.