How LocalJams gathers, checks and corrects listings: our editorial and data policy

LocalJams is an independent listings service for live music on the island of Ireland. We gather public information about gigs, sessions and concerts, organise it by date, place, venue and artist, and present it in one searchable place. We do not promote shows, we do not sell tickets, and we do not take payment from venues or promoters for placement. Every listing links to the official source where one exists, and the venue or promoter is always the final word on times, prices and availability.

This page explains how the listings are produced, so you can judge how far to trust any given one. It is written to be read by the people who use the site and by the venues and artists who appear on it.

Our listings come from three kinds of public source:

• Venue websites: the what’s-on or events pages of venues, from concert halls to pubs, where the venue publishes its own calendar.
• Ticketing platforms: the pages of the ticket sellers that venues and promoters use, including Eventbrite and the larger national platforms, which carry the most structured information about ticketed shows.
• Established listings pages: what’s-on guides and event calendars that publish structured listings for a city or region.

We also accept listings directly from verified venue and artist accounts through Backstage (see the venue owner’s guide). We do not source listings from private social media posts, from paid feeds, or from anything behind a login.

Every night at 02:00 Irish time, our crawlers visit each source and read what has changed. New events are added, changed events are updated, and events that have disappeared from their source are reviewed. The whole run completes in the early hours, so what you see in the morning reflects the sources as they stood overnight. A gig announced at lunchtime will typically appear on LocalJams the following morning; a time change made by a venue in the afternoon will usually show the next day.

That lag is the single most important thing to know about our data. We are a daily snapshot, not a live feed. For a show tonight, the ticket page or the venue is more current than we are, and we link to both.

Raw crawled data is messy, and most of our work is in cleaning it. The same venue is often listed under slightly different names or town names on different platforms; we merge those into a single venue, and where we have not yet caught one, you may briefly see two pages for the same place. A single listing for a three-band bill is split into its individual artists, so that each artist has a page and each appears in the right genre filters. Non-music events (quizzes, comedy, sport on the big screen) that sit in the same calendars as gigs are filtered out, and recurring entertainment that is not live music (karaoke, DJ nights, silent discos) is kept but labelled as such.

Sessions are a special case. A pub’s weekly trad session is one event in reality and seven a week in a listings database. We show sessions as recurring listings with their usual day and start time, so the same pub appears on the same night each week. The musicians will differ, the start may drift, and bank holidays may disrupt it; the listing tells you the pattern, not a promise about a particular Tuesday.

We keep a short list of rules about inference, because the alternative is confident-looking data that is wrong.

• Free: we mark a gig as free only when a source says so explicitly. No price is not the same as free, and a listing without a price is shown without one.
• Prices: the price we show is a “from” price, the cheapest tier we found at the last crawl, and it may exclude booking and service fees. It is a comparison aid, not a quote.
• Times: we show the start time as published. Where a source gives only “doors”, we show that and label it where we can. We do not guess stage times.
• Genres: artist genres are assigned from the source descriptions and from our own tagging, and they are approximate. A band tagged “folk” may be louder than you expect.
• Sold out: we do not currently track availability. A listing on LocalJams does not mean tickets remain.
• Cancellations: when a source removes or marks a show as cancelled we reflect that on the next crawl. A show cancelled on the day may still appear.

Our tickets guide goes into prices and fees in more depth, and our free music guide explains what the free badge does and does not mean.

A venue or artist that has claimed its profile can edit its own details and gigs. Data entered by a verified owner takes precedence over crawled data for the same field, and the nightly crawl will not overwrite it. Crawled gigs are still added to claimed profiles, so a venue that claims its page gets the benefit of the automatic listings plus the ability to correct them. We ask owners to keep edits factual; a profile description is not an advertisement, and we reserve the right to trim ones that read like one.

After a gig has happened, anyone with a LocalJams account can rate it on a few simple axes, such as the energy of the crowd, the musicianship and the sound, and leave a short note. Reviews are shown on the gig, artist and venue pages and feed the venue’s overall rating. We moderate reviews for abuse, spam and obvious conflicts of interest (a venue reviewing itself, a band reviewing its rivals), and we remove ones that breach our terms. We do not remove reviews because a venue or artist dislikes them. Reviews are opinions, and we present them as such.

We get things wrong, and the fastest way to fix a listing is to tell us. Email support@localjams.live with a link to the page and what is wrong, or use the contact page. Typical corrections: a gig at the wrong venue, a duplicate venue, a cancelled show still listed, a wrong start time, a band split incorrectly, a session that has moved night, or a free night that is not free. We apply manual corrections by hand, usually within a few days, and a correction we have applied is protected from being overwritten by the next crawl.

If the problem is in the source (the venue’s own site has the wrong time, say), we will correct our listing and, where it seems useful, let the venue know. If you are the venue, the better long-term fix is to claim your profile and correct it yourself.

The articles in this guides section are written by the LocalJams editorial team, by people who go to a lot of gigs on this island. They are not sponsored, we do not accept payment for mentioning a venue, and where we use our own data to support a claim (such as the share of free gigs in a county) we say so and we give the figure as it stood when the article was written. Venues are named because we think they are worth knowing about, and left out because of space, not because of any arrangement. If you think a guide is out of date or unfair, email us; venues change their nights all the time, and we would rather fix an article than defend it.

More about who we are is on the about page.