For the past two years, Portlanders had their January calendars filled up with local music shows, thanks to Portland Music Month (PMM): an annual celebration of local artists and venues that encouraged fans to go out and hear live music during what is generally one of the darkest and coldest months of the year.
So if you feel a lingering sense that you should be knee-deep in shows, you’re not wrong. The bad news: There’s no Portland Music Month for 2025. The good news: The organization that started it, MusicPortland, only needed a pause.
MusicPortland has made a name for itself locally, since it created PMM in 2022. It’s now best known for either the Echo Fund—a program which doles out small grants to artists to help them finish recording projects, make videos, or press up their music on vinyl—or for its ongoing advocacy fight, on behalf of the area’s music community, against global entertainment monolith Live Nation.
The organization also took on the task of doling out city funding this year. MusicOregon (which is basically MusicPortland but state-minded) was one of three nonprofits selected to distribute small grants on behalf of the city of Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture. In November, it awarded $85,000 in grants to 22 projects.
For Meara McLaughlin, MusicPortland’s executive director, that support helped make the decision to suspend this year’s event a lot easier to stomach.
There’s also an expanded vision that the team wants to pursue, with ideas like highlighting a different quadrant of the city during each week of the festival and solidifying new cross-promotion partnerships with local record shops, restaurants, and hotels. In previous years, PMM has offered impressive giveaways, with the chances of winning increasing for every show attended. Last year, prizes included a vintage car and an e-bike.
McLaughlin has seen eagerness from even more kinds of businesses to participate. For example, she says, “if you have a ticket to a music show, you get a discount [at a hotel] on our already lowest rates. You get a free breakfast entree. I was starting conversations with the art museum and different attractions to find out how we say, ‘If you engage with music, all these other good things happen for you.’”
The decision to suspend PMM was due to getting “a late start” in planning, she says, as well as “the election and other things that were going on.”
“We were finding a bit of anxiety within our sponsor community about what’s going to happen with the new administration,” McLaughlin says. “I didn’t want to waste the opportunity on anything less than a full realization of the model.”
Planning for the 2026 edition of the event, she promises, will get underway as soon as March of this year.
