This is Part 3 of the Gazette series Renting Montreal. Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.
When musician Andrew Woods arrived in Montreal from Prince Edward Island around 2010, he and his bandmates were paying $300 each in rent and he was washing dishes to survive.
“I loved it because I could just disappear into the back kitchen and play whatever music I wanted,” recalled Woods, 42, who’s also now recording engineer from his studio above the bar Ping Pong Club in Mile End. “But it destroyed my body.”
The building, an unassuming walk-up on Bernard St where bass can rattle right up until three in the morning on weekends, has become part of Montreal music folklore. Arcade Fire came. Stars and Operators, too. And for over a decade now, Woods has been recording in the walls.
“You would not want to live here,” he said. “But it’s perfect for making records.”
That stretch of turf specifically, along with other neighbourhoods in the city, made a music career in Montreal feel possible, he said. Cheap apartments and flexible restaurant jobs drew young musicians who could survive long enough to experiment, tour badly paid gigs and give enough time to manage a breakthrough.
But that bargain has frayed.
The average asking residential rent in Montreal has jumped about 70 per cent in the last seven years, according to Statistics Canada. A two-bedroom apartment, for example, has climbed from about $1,100 to more than $1,900. In just 2025, rents rose another 7.2 per cent, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation data.
Streaming, meanwhile, has displaced much of the radio income and album sales many artists once relied on. The economics of making it in the city have shifted.
And yet, Woods said, musicians keep arriving.
“People say Mile End is dead because their version of Mile End is dead,” he said. “But musicians are still moving here. That hasn’t stopped.”
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He arrived at an awkward moment for the music industry, just as the old economics of independent music were beginning to change.
His indie rock band at the time, Boxer the Horse, was finding some success on Canada’s East Coast — one of their songs was repeatedly picked up by a SiriusXM DJ, generating meaningful income, Woods said. In 2010, they were named the best new band in Canada by CBC Radio 3 at the annual Bucky Awards after their debut album Would You Please.
However, Montreal proved more challenging.
“You have to hustle for everything,” he said on arriving in the city. “If you want a show, you put it on yourself.”
Then, in 2014, he met the musician who would change the course of his life.
“She’s from Toronto,” he said. “I served her at the restaurant.”
That musician is the folk singer Basia Bulat. They began playing in each other’s bands almost immediately, he explained. Today, they are married with two children, balancing family life with the rhythm of working musicians.
“When she puts out a record, we’ll do a U.S. tour, then all across Canada, then Sweden, Germany, Poland, Spain,” Woods said. “You have to keep going back if you want to build it.”
Touring with Bulat gave him his first real version of full-time music work.
But he still wanted something of his own.
So he also slowly built a recording studio inside the old Mile End building, inviting bands in after shows, drinking beers and listening to demos late into the night. Then one band asked him to make a record.
“Let’s go,” he remembered telling them.
The studio expanded piece by piece: a better microphone, then a compressor, then more instruments and software.
“You literally figured it out as the demands came,” he said.
The technology around him was changing too.
When Woods recorded with his band in the early 2010s, the cost of three days in a professional studio amounted to roughly two months’ rent each, he said. Whereas a teenager can begin recording with a laptop, GarageBand and a cheap microphone.
That democratization has lowered barriers for young artists.
Andrew Woods, musician and recording engineer, in his Montreal studio on Thursday, May 14, 2026. Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette
Still, the infrastructure that supports independent musicians has come under pressure, too.
The 2024 closure of the historic Montreal venue La Tulipe, along with similar shutdowns across Canada, hurt many artists who rely on small venues to build audiences.
According to a statistical profile commissioned by the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the median income for artists in the city is about $17,400 a year, though that does not include additional credits given by the government.
Woods believes Quebec’s tighter rent protections have helped preserve parts of Montreal’s artistic ecosystem. Without them, he suspects, many musicians, rehearsal spaces and studios would already be gone.
Even so, he worries about losing his own space.
“I knock on wood every year,” he said. “Because this took years to build.”
Recently, two younger musicians who had moved to Montreal only a few years earlier stopped by to look around.
It was the kind of visit Woods said he sees often: proof, in his view, that Mile End’s pull is intact even as its economics have shifted.
“It’s pretty hard to deny that rent was cheaper, groceries were cheaper,” he said. “But the hustle is still there.”
Despite everything, he still talks like someone convinced the next big hit could arrive tomorrow.
“I still believe,” he said, “that I could put out a song that gets another radio DJ’s attention.”
Do you have a story tip? Write to me at hnorth@postmedia.com
Part 4 of Renting Montreal will publish on Sunday, June 5.
I’ve been writing for the Montreal Gazette since 2023. My favourite stories are ones that make you think and I’m always looking for new ways to tell them. At McGill, I studied economics and computer science. Now I live in the city’s Plateau, where I wear Doc Martens to try and blend in among the hipsters. Got a story? Email me.
hnorth@postmedia.com