Different Gear Mgmt Inc. — federally incorporated June 10, 2025 (Corporations Canada), registered extra-provincially in British Columbia.
Co-founders/shareholders: Matthew Owchar and Miro Oballa. Corporate officers: Matthew Owchar (President), Angela Donna Christensen (Secretary). Legal counsel: Taylor Oballa Murray Leyland LLP, Toronto.
Different Gear is an artist management company in the middle of a banner year with Sophia Stel’s breakout campaign. Matthew Owchar, co-founder and President, has spent decades as a taste-driven operator in Vancouver’s music scene — most recently running Paradise (2019–2025), and UV, his event company, alongside Different Gear.
Miro Oballa is Different Gear’s co-founder and legal/strategic counsel. A music lawyer for nearly 25 years and partner at Taylor Oballa Murray Leyland LLP, he brings long-cycle music-business, rights, and artist-representation judgment into the company. His firm has worked with major Canadian artists including Nelly Furtado and Drake. While living in Vancouver, Miro co-founded the record label Specials; after Specials wound down, his work with Matt around Sophia helped move the opportunity from label context into management, becoming the origin path for Different Gear. In the current grant cycle, Miro has pressure-tested the application framing, roster strategy, Creative BC read, support-letter strategy, and long-term IP position.
A breakout anchoring a small independent company is a big moment. It brings the option to build durable multi-artist capacity and extend the moment outward to the ecosystem. New access, relationships, and operating know-how are now available and the company aims to capture this.
Jarett Holmes leads the technology build as Strategic Partner and Technology Lead. His writing, production, and engineering credits span major-label and independent releases with combined streams over 4.3 billion and RIAA Diamond and Platinum certifications. He co-founded the music-licensing platform Ritual Music in 2016, working across all areas of the business, including product design and engineering. In AI, his commercial capabilities work has been deployed to DoorDash, Pinterest, Telus, and Sotheby’s.
The size and timing of this project are calibrated against how that moment converts. DG is currently operating at capacity and the nature of this moment makes three places in the company’s day-to-day operations time-sensitive. The grant-funded build is scoped against them directly.
First, the operational substrate’s hardening window. Different Gear runs a working operational stack today — tour logistics intake, live itinerary serving, automated venue advancing, booking pipeline, sandbox validation, claims-dossier assembly, merch logistics and inventory intelligence, and early Instagram/social asset capture — built and proven against Sophia’s live touring campaign. Productizing pilot tools into multi-user, multi-artist company infrastructure produces stronger and more credible production systems against active high-stakes use than against quieter conditions later. The current touring cycle is the proving ground.
Second, Sophia’s strategic arc. A breakout concentrates high-stakes decisions. Brand partnerships, sync licensing, tour routing, announce timing, press prioritization, label relationship management, and each wrong call compounds into the next cycle. The tools this project funds hold the company’s thinking across those decisions in one organized place, rather than in one operator’s head during a busy week.
Third, inbound valuation. This year is generating heavy deal and opportunity traffic both for the artist and for the roster — festivals, support slots, syncs, brand approaches, collaborations, press asks — each carrying different value in different territories against different stages of an artist’s career. Consistent, sophisticated evaluation across that inbound is central to running a coherent campaign rather than a scattered one.
Different Gear’s central product is one structured system that holds everything the company knows — about each artist, each deal in progress, each campaign in motion, and each decision the company has made. Adapters to the platforms where the company’s data already lives (streaming, ticketing, advertising, email, booking) deposit records into it; four are in the repo today with more scoped into the grant-funded build. Per-artist and per-campaign records organize that data into goals, active experiments, open decisions, and a live working log. A single view across the full roster, with role-based permissions so each person sees only what they should — load-bearing for production use and in scope for the grant — gives the operator one coherent picture.
These tools were built on Sophia’s campaign and are running against it now. The grant-funded Workstream 1/2 work integrates them into the shared information system and hardens them for multi-artist use.
Moving from pilot tools that one operator runs against one campaign to full production tools that multiple people use across multiple artists — and that hold private artist data — changes what the company has to take seriously. Pilot tools can defer questions that production tools cannot: who is allowed to see what, how the login credentials for outside platforms are stored and rotated, how one artist’s data is kept separate from another’s so one artist’s agent cannot see another’s deals, how the company’s action log stays trustworthy, what happens to an artist’s information when they leave the company.
This work is scoped into the shared-system build (Workstream 1) and the production conversion (Workstream 2) — it’s not an afterthought and it isn’t compliance veneer. The company’s claim that artist data is used only in the service of the artist’s career (stated in the AI disclosure and the respectful workplace policy) depends on the underlying system actually enforcing it. Permissions by role, strict separation between one artist’s data and another’s, safe credential handling with regular rotation, a trustworthy action log, and clear artist data consent and retention policies are load-bearing deliverables of this grant.
The tools are a set of views on the shared intelligence system. The system is the company’s accumulated knowledge and decision-making framework.
Sophia Stel. Signed to A24 with an album advance paid in November 2025. 2026 touring:
The contracted 2026 book — touring, brand, and label combined — generates a management commission base (20% on tour, brand, and label; 0% on merch) sufficient to anchor the matching side of this grant and support the company’s operating commitments through the grant period. Specific figures are held at the application layer and available to the funder on request.
Sophia is the proof case, not the funded beneficiary. The grant does not pay for her touring or artist-specific campaign costs. The working tool set is in use on this tour; measuring its actual effect against the campaign — incidents avoided, operator hours saved, decisions grounded in the record — is the Workstream 2 measurement obligation inside the grant.
$50,000 ask against a $100,000+ total project, eligible period January 1, 2026 – June 30, 2027. The match side is grounded in contracted 2026 management revenue (above) and company cash.
The grant funds four connected workstreams: