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Entrepreneur starts Ottawa Gigs site to help frustrated music lovers find shows across the city

December 11, 2024

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When you think of cities with a strong music subculture, Ottawa may not be top of mind. But one local entrepreneur is trying to change that. Will Stockdale has always been a fan of live music. He grew up surrounded by what he calls the “golden era of 2000s indie rock,” with music from bands like Arctic Monkeys, the Strokes, and Bloc Party. Originally from the U.K., he moved to Ottawa five years ago to be with his partner who works for the government, in what he calls “a pretty typical Ottawa immigrant story.” In 2023, he decided to see more live music to help shake off pandemic life. That’s when he became increasingly frustrated. Without one place to see all the show listings throughout the city, it became a tedious task to scour the internet to find them all. “I’m a startup founder and, in early 2023, I had some time between my last venture and starting a new company. I knew how to build websites, and if I was doing all this gig research for my personal use, why not publish it? There had to be other music fans in Ottawa like me,” he said. In March 2023, he started Ottawa Gigs, a centralized show listings website. “I want Ottawa Gigs to be the best place to discover live music in Ottawa. When any Ottawan thinks, ‘I’d like to see a show, I wonder what’s on?’, I want to make sure they find something they'll want to go to,” Stockdale said. To build the database of shows on his site, he gathers data from more than 35 venues in the city, from larger venues in the downtown core to small pubs in Orleans and everything in between. He categorizes them all by genre, venue, and neighbourhood to facilitate searches. As the task for gathering all the relevant data became harder to keep up with, Stockdale sought the help of automation. “Modern technology has brought down the barriers to creating a service like Ottawa Gigs and I’m hopeful that further innovation will help make it sustainable. It’s an unusual story of AI actually helping the arts,” he said. Now, Stockdale has also created an Ottawa Music Wrapped report, showcasing data he has collected that reflects what the Ottawa music industry looked like in 2024. According to the report, Ottawa Gigs listed more than 1,700 shows from more than 1,300 artists in 2024. “If you were searching for a show on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, on average you would have had 33 weekend shows to choose from,” the report said. Stockdale’s data shows the top five genres were rock music (314 listings), jazz (225 listings), indie (212 listings), folk (202 listings), and blues (95 listings). “While rock shows took the crown for the most popular genre, the main takeaway from our data is the diversity of genres available to gig-goers,” the report said. Stockdale’s data showed the top three venues in Ottawa were The Rainbow Bistro, with 167 listings, Live! On Elgin, with more than 150 listings, and Red Bird, with just under 150 listings – venues that are all located in or near the downtown core. “Beyond raising the profile of live music in Ottawa, what’s most satisfying is seeing the data on people clicking the ‘get tickets’ button for shows. Last month, Ottawa Gigs sent over 500 people to get tickets who otherwise might not have known about those shows, which is all additional revenue into the local music scene,” he said. “I’m excited to drive those numbers much higher in future as awareness of the site increases, including through a more extensive social media presence and working closely with (Ottawa Music Industry Coalition) and the nightlife commissioner to see how the site can best support the city’s nightlife plan.” Stockdale was one of the 500 people who applied to be a part of the nightlife council but was not chosen. Nonetheless, he sees the creation of the council as good news. “We look back a year ago and we didn’t have a nightlife commissioner, we didn’t have all this attention being put on nightlife in Ottawa. We’ll see what happens over the next few months but it’ll be exciting to see things come together,” Stockdale said. Ottawa Gigs has seen some notable growth since it launched nearly two years ago, with more than 3,500 people using the site monthly – a number that has increased 500 per cent since the beginning of 2024 – and more than 1,250 subscribers to the weekly newsletter. Stockdale says the feedback he has received is “overwhelmingly positive,” but he isn’t sure if it can translate into commercial success. “The task (to curate a site like Ottawa Gigs) was too big for one of the city’s non-profits to take on, but not a big enough commercial opportunity for it to be attractive to the private sector,” he said. “That's an interesting puzzle for me to figure out, is how to make a site like this sustainable, even though everyone wants it to exist.”