Editorial standards

A gig is only labelled free on positive evidence — the venue says so, a parsed ticket price is zero, or it comes from a source we have verified publishes walk-in, no-charge pub gigs. The absence of a ticket link is not evidence of anything.

When we genuinely don't know, the listing says Check venue. That is a less satisfying badge than “Free”, and it is the honest one. Prices come from the ticket page, never from inference about the venue or the size of the act.

Admission is re-checked, not set once: if a later pass finds a ticket page or a real price for a gig recorded as free, the listing corrects itself.

Where sources disagree about when a gig starts, the venue's own site wins over an aggregator: a venue publishing “doors 10pm” beats a listings site that assumed 9pm. Once a time is confirmed by an authoritative source, a weaker one cannot overwrite it.

A missing time is shown as missing. Many platforms render an unannounced start as midnight — “12:00 am” — and we treat that as time unknown rather than publish a gig that appears to begin at midnight. A genuine after-midnight start, such as a 12:30 am set, is kept as-is.

LocalJams is a live music service, so non-music events are filtered out at the point of ingest: comedy, theatre and musicals, film screenings, talks and workshops, quizzes and teenage discos, children's stage-school showcases, and coach transfers that sell a seat on a bus to a concert rather than a ticket to the concert.

Filters are never perfect, so a second line of defence runs every night: a sweep re-checks recently added events against their source category and removes anything non-music that slipped through, along with the artist entries it created — no waiting for someone to notice.

“Traditional Session”, “Live Music”, “Open Mic” and similar recurring labels are not artists, and we don't pass them off as such. They keep the gig's title so you can see what the night is, but they are flagged as session labels and excluded from the artist directory, artist search and trending lists.

The same goes for promoter and production titles naming no performer, like “A Night at the Movies”. Where a real act is named inside such a title we credit the act; where a bill lists several acts, each is a separate artist on the same gig rather than one invented group name.

Sources describe the same venue differently — one pub can appear under a town, a suburb and a city label, which is how it turns into three entries. Those fragments get merged, but only against external evidence such as a shared Eircode or address, never on a matching name.

That restraint matters, because plenty of genuinely different Irish venues share a name, and merging two of them on a string match would be worse than leaving both. The same rule governs artist entries.

Ratings are left by signed-in account holders, scoring a specific gig on overall impression, crowd energy, musicianship and sound quality. There are no anonymous ratings, no imported or purchased reviews, and none written by us. Claiming a profile does not let anyone edit or delete the ratings they have received.

To be straight about it: LocalJams is an aggregator with an automated pipeline and a small independent operation behind it. We do not claim a person reads every listing before it publishes — the rules above exist precisely because the pipeline has to be conservative without a human in the loop.

We don't sell tickets and we aren't the box office: the venue or promoter is always the final word on times, prices, cancellations and availability, and we link straight to their page wherever one exists. Prominence is never for sale — see how LocalJams is funded.