Lizzie Powell of Land of Talk, one of the Canadian indie rock bands playing festival stages this summer. (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

How much music can one city take? A couple of weeks ago, Toronto’s North by Northeast festival showcased over 600 musical acts in five days. The upcoming Sled Island fest in Calgary will present 231 acts.

Indie musicians must hit the road – and hit it hard – if they hope to make a dent in a crowded marketplace.

For many of the bands involved, these events have become regular stops on a concert calendar that may also include big American fests like South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, (2,000 acts) and the CMJ Music Marathon in New York (a slightly more manageable 1,200 bands). Back in Canada, such long-established events as Pop Montreal, the Halifax Pop Explosion, Vancouver’s New Music West and Guelph, Ont.’s Hillside Festival give opportunities to bands trying to win new converts.

While downloading continues to have an adverse effect on sales of recorded music, there is considerable appetite for the live variety, especially on this emergent circuit of music festivals that are largely oriented toward the ever-amorphous genre known as indie rock. These events have a one-stop-shopping kind of appeal, offering a huge amount of music in a small span of time and concentrated space — for hardy gig-goers, it’s a great way to discover new bands. But their growing importance underscores the fact that indie musicians must hit the road – and hit it hard – if they hope to make a dent in a crowded marketplace.

“Playing lots of shows is definitely important,” says Zak Pashak, festival director for Sled Island, which runs June 30 to July 3. “It seems to me that music is more focused around live performance than it was before.” Pashak says that raves on influential music sites like Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan can spark interest in new acts, but a band’s devotion to putting on a consistently strong live show may count for more in the long run.

Becky Black, left, and Maya Miller of Vancouver's Pack A.D. will be at Calgary's Sled Island fest. (Mark Maryanovich/Mint Records)

Consider the case of the Pack A.D., a scrappy, high-energy garage-punk duo from Vancouver that played this year’s SXSW and NXNE and will be at Sled Island in support of their third full-length disc, We Kill Computers. Last year, they racked up an astonishing 157 live shows.

“I can’t think of any indie band that actually makes money off of record sales or iTunes or anything like that,” says Pack A.D. singer-guitarist Becky Black. “You bring merch[andise] with you on tour and you hope to sell some then and pay for gas and food and all that. But in terms of getting the word around, it’s always been more about touring for us. We just work all the time!”

Black and Pack A.D. drummer Maya Miller made that call early on, deciding to quit their day jobs after their first tour. She considers the chance to do music full-time “wicked awesome,” but there are drawbacks. “It feels weird when we go back home,” Black says. “I’m so used to not being at home that I don’t know what to do with my life.” Some indie-rock types are flexible enough to find favour with bookers at folk, roots and jazz festivals, too. Timber Timbre and Ghostkeeper will soon do sets at the Calgary Folk Festival, while the Montreal Jazz Festival includes the not-so-jazzy likes of Basia Bulat, Land of Talk and Plants and Animals.

The festival circuit can dictate a band’s calendar on the road, with acts booking tours around festival times and doing their own shows in-between. That can create a logistical pile-up, with bands competing for gigs around the dates of major fests like SXSW. Non-festival shows are especially crucial, since few bands make money doing festivals.

SXSW has become the ultimate place to make it or break it. In recent years, it’s become a ritual for upstart acts to test their mettle by doing multiple performances at clubs and outdoor shows — a trend that was sparked after the Black Lips did over a dozen shows at SXSW in 2007. The Pack A.D. have faced that particular trial by fire, too.

Singer Damian Abraham, seen crowd-surfing here at the Coachella festival, will play Sled Island with his band F---ed Up. (Karl Walter/Getty Images)

“We’ve done like five or six shows in two days there,” says Black. “You don’t really get to see any other bands – you’re pretty much hopping from one show to the next. It’s like, ‘OK, you’ve gotta get on stage!’ Then we do and play and then pack up for the next place. And you’re getting free drinks everywhere, which doesn’t always help! It’s hard to tell to whether a show is being good or not because it’s such a blur.”

Putting together a festival isn’t easy, either. Pashak says Calgary’s poor proximity to other cities makes it especially challenging to get international acts to play one-off shows there. One American agent told him that asking U.S. acts to come all the way to Calgary is roughly equivalent to asking them to play rural Mexico.

He’s grateful for the assistance provided by guest curators – at this year’s Sled Island, King Khan, Quintron and Miss Pussycat and F---ed Up all preside over bills they helped select. Says Pashak, “It’s one thing for me to go to bands and say that Zak Pashak wants you to come play in Calgary – it’s a whole other thing to say F---ed Up wants you to play their stage at the Sled Island festival.”

Over the four years of Sled Island’s existence, Pashak has seen the music industry curtail its ambitions when it comes to festivals. Concert promotion giant Live Nation launched a festival in Pemberton, B.C., in 2008 with big-name headliners such as Coldplay, Jay-Z and Nine Inch Nails. Despite attendance figures of 40,000, the festival has not been repeated. Similarly, there will be no Virgin festivals this summer, despite the varying degrees of success of events in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary from 2006 to 2009. “The festivals are pretty expensive and hard to put on and they are not necessarily money-makers,” says Pashak.

King Khan is one of the artists guest-curating this year's Sled Island. (Charley Gallay/Getty Images)

For him, a better role model for Sled Island is Pop Montreal, which retains a community-based approach after eight years in action. Pashak hopes that by presenting a strong and diverse program of acts, Sled Island can help foster a loyal audience for bands who may or may not have attained flavour-of-the-week status in the blogosphere but can consistently deliver the goods. After all, being a buzz band may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

“I don’t think we’ve ever fit in that category,” says Black of the Pack A.D. “It can be a good thing, but it can also be really bad for a band, especially one that’s not really used to the road and then suddenly have a big tour booked. Everyone’s going to come see the shows at first, but a lot of those people are hipsters and they eventually lose interest and find something else. If you’re a good enough band, you can overcome that and become amazing.”

Sled Island runs June 30 to July 3 in Calgary.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto who spent his formative years praying for bands to come through Calgary.