/TORONTO/

A petition organized on the Change.org website a few days ago following reports, including one in this publication on Thursday, about the North By North East festival (NXNE) forbidding its artists to play downtown venues for a 45-day period prior to the start of the festival, has led the clause to be dropped for 2015, according to a report by Huffington Post Canada.

Festival founder and NOW Toronto publisher Michael Hollett is quoted in the article as saying the festival hadn’t full realized the “unintended consquences” of its imposition of the clause, which many artists felt was a form of bullying.

More background on the story can be found an article in Chart Attack online questioning whether NXNE has lost touch with its musician base.