Canada

From the Montreal Jazz Festival, the largest jazz festival on earth, which turns downtown into an open-air stage every summer, to the rock, pop and hip-hop weekends of Osheaga on Île Sainte-Hélène, Canada spreads out a festival landscape as vast as the country itself. Montreal is its cultural capital, a bilingual city where the festival is a civic institution: MUTEK probes electronic music and digital arts there, while further west the federal capital lights up the banks of the Ottawa River with Ottawa Bluesfest, one of the biggest gatherings in the land.

But it is in the forests of British Columbia that Canada cultivates its most distinctive signature: the Shambhala Music Festival, tucked away on a remote Kootenay ranch, and Bass Coast have made the western mountains a sanctuary for electronic and bass culture. At the other end of the country, the Prairies keep a deeply rooted folk tradition alive, faithfully guarded for decades by the Winnipeg Folk Festival. FestT works out your FestiScore — how closely a line-up matches your favourite artists — and keeps dates, headliners and ticketing up to date.