Our Mission

For close to 30 years, Small World Music has been celebrating cultural diversity and showcasing a range of local, domestic, and international talent to audiences across the Greater Toronto Area.

Our vision goes beyond simply presenting culturally-diverse artists to supporting underrepresented professionals onstage and behind the scenes.

Our projects constitute a holistic approach to bringing equity and accessibility to the music industry, creating opportunities for equity-deserving communities, and acting as a sector development organization to encourage much-needed industry change.

Enabling Artists

To enable equity for culturally diverse artists and their work.

To create opportunities for emerging, newcomer and underrepresented artists.

Engaging Audiences

To create human connections through shared musical experiences

To be a resource that expands cultural horizons

Connecting Industry

To be a catalyst for industry change by creating opportunities and building bridges

To be a global ambassador of Canada’s multicultural identity

About Small World Music Society

Small World Music (SWM), founded in 1997, has produced close to six hundred concerts and introduced Toronto audiences to some of the greatest names in world music (Tinariwen, Habib Koité, Zakir Hussain, and Mariza to name a few). It has nurtured the careers of dozens of emerging artists and in doing so, celebrated Canada as a place of inclusion where free expression and exchange of ideas are inseparable from our identity.

In 2014 Small World entered an exciting new phase of its organizational life with a new home & community hub for global music – the Small World Music Centre, at Artscape’s YoungPlace located on Shaw Street near Queen West.

The Centre is a high-quality listening room with flexible seating for 60-100 to host intimate performances, educational workshops and community events. A space where tradition meets innovation – a cross-cultural incubator where new ideas and new Canadian music can flourish and where newcomer emerging artists can develop their careers.

In 2019, SWM took over the Global Toronto (GT) conference/showcase event, which, through two online editions and a 2022 in-person/online combination, has been encouraging international discovery of diverse music, as well as gathering a global community engaged in moving the industry forward.

Rooted in one of the world’s most multicultural cities and operating through a global lens, GT operates with the needs of underrepresented professionals and artists at the fore. GT celebrates, showcases, and brings together the breadth and depth of talent on all sides of the stage. GT is an international platform for connecting export-ready, culturally-diverse artists and professionals across the music ecosystem.

Most recently, in 2020, SWM launched a significant new initiative for the organization — one that leads it in a new direction and a new chapter well suited to a 21st-century presenter. These days, simply putting on shows is only part of the responsibility of a presenter. Today, presenters need to invest in the next generation to not only clear the path to sustainability, but to reveal that there is even a possibility of a path for these underrepresented and marginalized artists. 

The Music Incubator program is Small World’s signature creative and professional development program dedicated to artist career sustainability and their integration into the Canadian cultural ecosystem. Through a suite of activities, the program creates community-building opportunities for equity-deserving musicians, including Indigenous, Black, People of Colour, 2SLGBTQIA+, newcomers, refugees, and the diverse-abled.