Toronto’s music community started 2025 with a loss.
For a quarter-century, musicians, promoters and audiences had turned to the weekly email digest SoundList for local event listings, but it was falling apart.
Beleaguered by technical issues, SoundList dispatches slowed from weekly to monthly updates in fall 2024.
“There were coding errors with the submission platform and the server wouldn’t allow new subscriptions [or] unsubscriptions,” says former SoundList editor Fahmid Nibesh. “Submissions for the newsletter wouldn’t even make it to the inbox at random, leading to [user] frustration.”
In January 2025, it stopped arriving altogether.
But Nibesh was already working on a successor.
He and fellow SoundList volunteer Peter Gough began designing an alternative when SoundList editor Ambrose Pottie solicited for more editors without their consultation in November 2024. In February this year, Nibesh and Gough filled the void with a new resource called Earlobe.
“We wanted a centralized place for events where you didn’t have to dig through Instagram stories [or] dig through your email inbox just to find out what was happening,” says fellow Earlobe contributor Karen Ng.
Like SoundList, Earlobe is specifically for experimental music: free improvisation, sound art, electroacoustic music, new concert music, sound poetry and sound sculpture. Musicians in these scenes sometimes feature in more mainstream projects (Ng has performed with Feist, Broken Social Scene and Andy Shauf), but the spontaneous nature of their work leads to a relatively under-the-radar scene that relies on active gigging and a healthy showgoing culture.
Earlobe is not the only music-listing game in town. A pillar of the city’s hardcore scene, Not Dead Yet has been encouraging its audiences to jump ship from social media, offering a Substack newsletter that lists upcoming concerts. Kensington Market instrument shop Paul’s Boutique and jazz presenters JazzInToronto are compiling local event listings in Instagram posts.
But relying on Substack and Instagram means bearing the whims of their corporate owners and contending with profit-driven algorithm tweaks that can bury time-sensitive news about shows.
“We want to get away from that stuff,” Ng says. “It’s not helpful.”
That’s why Earlobe is owned and built by artists themselves. In addition to Gough, Ng and Nibesh, the Earlobe team also includes bassist Michael Lynn. And Colin Cudmore, a percussionist who applies extended drum techniques to everyday objects like spring coils and dust pans, is responsible for the website’s coding and technical development.
Aside from an “under construction” notice, Earlobe.ca is bare-bones: just a box to sign up for a weekly newsletter and a Google Form to submit event listings. But Ng says the immediate priority is developing the site to show a live calendar of local events that anyone can submit to, offering users a moderated bird’s-eye view of what’s happening on any given night in Toronto and the GTA.
That could also help bookers streamline event planning.
As a volunteer-run operation, it remains to be seen whether Earlobe will succumb to the same pressures that sunk SoundList. But sustainability is top of mind.
Whether that means rotating out responsibilities or building new systems for sharing information within the team, Ng says it’s something they’re considering every step of the way.
The team is also talking to the people behind Brooklyn’s NYC NOISE and Montreal’s Ask A Punk for web development and coding advice.
“The more people that use it, the more people that submit events, the more we learn too what works or what is needed,” Ng explains. “If we find it sustainable, it could be used as a framework for others.”
This article appeared in the 2025 Oct/Nov issue.