Submissions
As of November 5 at 11am, submissions to play POP Montreal 2027 (September 22 to 26) are open! Send us your music at sym.popmontreal.com.
An entry costs $20, then $25 from December 15 and $30 from January 25.
Birds of Prrrey, photo by Charles-Antoine Marcotte
How we listen
It started on our office couches. Year after year, Montreal’s music curators, musicians and fans sat down with free beer and snacks and listened to every band that applied, voting yay or nay, one submission at a time.
Then the couch got bigger. vote.pop took those sessions online, and in 2026 listeners cast 38,656 votes from wherever they happened to be sitting.
Now it’s sym.presar.io. Our programming team reads and hears every entry: your bio, your answers, your tracks. In January, listeners get your music in random sets and vote on what they hear. You can vote too! Those votes inform the team’s conversation, and the team makes the call, with a whole festival’s worth of dates and rooms to fit together. If it isn’t your year, try us again. sym is also designing group listening sessions, so listening together stays part of this.
It’s how we deepen our accountability to our artists and our public while honouring our curatorial integrity. Which is a long way of saying you get a real listen, and you know how the decision gets made.