A venue owner’s guide to LocalJams: listing, claiming your profile and using Backstage

LocalJams lists live music across all 32 counties, and at the time of writing that covers a couple of thousand venues, from arenas to pubs with a session on a Tuesday. We did not ask any of them first. Our crawlers read public event information from venue websites, ticket platforms (including Eventbrite) and established what’s-on pages every night, and build venue and gig pages from what they find. If your venue publishes its gigs anywhere public, there is a good chance it has a page here already. Search for it on the venues directory to check.

That automatic listing is useful but limited. It has whatever details the crawler could read: your name, address, the gigs we found, and perhaps a description. It may have your name slightly wrong, two versions of your venue from two sources, or a gig at the wrong time. Claiming the profile fixes that, and it is free.

A claimed venue is one where a verified owner or manager has control of the profile. Once your claim is approved, you get access to Backstage, the management area at /manage, which lets you:

• Edit your venue profile: name, address, description, photo, website and social links.
• Add gigs yourself, including ones our crawlers have not found, and edit or remove the ones they have.
• See basic analytics for your profile and your gigs: views, follows and the like.
• Manage more than one venue (or a venue and a band) from the same account, switching between them.

Claimed profiles also take precedence over crawled data. If you set a start time or a price in Backstage, the nightly crawl will not overwrite it. For the rules on how crawled and claimed data interact, see how LocalJams listings work.

Go to /claim. You will need a LocalJams account; if you do not have one, sign up first with the email address you want to manage the venue from. Then:

• Choose “Venue” as the type of profile you are claiming.
• Search for your venue by name and pick it from the results. If it is genuinely not there, tick the option to say it is not in the list and we will create it as part of the claim.
• Select your role: venue manager or venue owner.
• Give a contact email. This defaults to your account email and is where we will write about the claim.
• Add proof. Links are best: your venue’s website, a social media account you administer, or a page that lists you as a contact. You can also upload up to six files (images or PDFs, each under 8 MB): a photo of you at the venue, a business document, a utility bill with the venue address, anything that shows you are who you say you are.
• Add a short message if there is anything we should know, such as a recent change of name or ownership.
• Submit.

We review every claim by hand. Most are approved within a few days; if we need more evidence we will email you at the contact address. You will get an email when the claim is approved, and Backstage will appear in your navigation the next time you sign in.

We are checking one thing: that you have a real connection to the venue. We are not interested in your accounts or your licence. The easiest proof is a public link that ties you to the business, such as a staff page or a social account you clearly run. If your venue’s website has a contact email on the same domain, claiming from that address is close to self-proving. If you are a manager rather than the owner, a short note from the owner, or a link to anything public showing your role, is enough. We would rather ask a follow-up question than reject a genuine claim, so if in doubt, submit what you have.

A claim can be refused if the proof does not connect you to the venue, if the profile has already been claimed by someone else (in which case we will contact both parties), or if the profile is not a live music venue at all. Refusals come with a reason and you can resubmit.

The first thing to do after approval is to go through your profile and correct anything the crawler got wrong. Check the name (we sometimes inherit odd capitalisation or a trailing town name from a ticket platform), the address and map pin, and the description. Add a photo; profiles with photos get followed and shared far more than those without.

Then look at your gigs. Backstage lists every upcoming gig on your profile with its source. Fix wrong times, add prices where ours are missing, mark free nights as free (we only show the free badge when a source says so, and you are now a source), and delete anything that should not be there. If you run a weekly session or residency, add it once as a recurring listing rather than week by week. Add the gigs we have missed, especially the ones that are not on a ticket platform; those are exactly the ones a crawler cannot find.

Keep it current. A profile with accurate times and a full calendar ranks higher within LocalJams, appears in more city and county guides, and is the one people follow. Followers get notified about your new gigs, so a claimed profile with a maintained calendar quietly builds its own audience.

Even with a claimed profile, most of your listings will arrive automatically from the nightly crawl, so it pays to make your public information easy to read. Practical tips from what we see across thousands of venues:

• Put your gigs on your own website in a consistent format: one event per entry, with the date, start time and price in text rather than only in an image.
• Use one name for your venue everywhere. “The Something Bar”, “Something’s” and “Somethings Bar, Townname” on three platforms become three venues in a database until someone merges them.
• If you use a ticket platform, fill in the start time and the price; a listing with “doors 8pm” and no price shows up with no price.
• State clearly when a gig is free. “Free entry” in the description is enough for us to flag it.
• Keep your address consistent, including the Eircode or postcode, so the map pin lands in the right place.

If something is wrong on your profile and you have not claimed it yet, you do not have to wait: email support@localjams.live with the correction and we will apply it by hand. The contact page has the other ways to reach us, and the about page explains who we are.