Montreal’s Osheaga Music and Arts Festival has been named one of the world’s 50 best music festivals.
The event at Jean-Drapeau Park, which this year runs July 29 to 31, is the only one in Canada on Billboard’s list of the “Top 50 Festivals Of 2022.”
Billboard noted that “much of what makes a festival great is totally subjective, but most fans who enjoy and attend festivals have had some part of their life affected by the experience.” Ranking festivals based on “influence both within the live-music ecosystem and as part of the larger music and cultural community,” it determined that Osheaga was worthy of the No. 22 spot.
“Quebec’s famed annual concert has a distinctively French Canadian identity … but Canada’s largest and longest-running indie festival’s bookings tend to have a broader appeal with mostly English-speaking artists,” it reads.
(Billboard’s blurb on Osheaga didn’t get everything right. It said the festival is named “after French explorer Jacques Cartier’s first contact with an aboriginal Mohawk tribe in 1535” – but Cartier first made contact with the Iroquois. And, it referred to “the iconic Montreal Biosphere that houses the Montreal Environmental Museum." The Biosphère is an environment museum but there is no "Montreal Environmental Museum.")
Osheaga was cancelled in 2020 and 2021 due COVID-19 and two of this year's headliners had to drop out – Foo Fighters were replaced by Arcade Fire and A$AP Rocky was replaced by Future.
The Billboard list ranks California’s Coachella as the No. 1 music festival, followed by the UK’s Glastonbury.
Osheaga Music and Arts Festival is presented by Bell, parent company of this website.