How we source listings

There is no single feed of Irish live music, so we read many separate sources and put them into one consistent shape. Every gig page links back to where its details came from, and to the official ticket page where one exists, so you can check us against the source.

The whole pipeline runs every night: sources are re-read, new events added, existing ones re-checked — so a confirmed time, a ticket link that appears, or a price going on sale is picked up without anyone intervening. A second automated pass later the same night re-verifies recent events and removes any that turn out not to be music.

Gigs added by artists and venues through their own profile appear immediately, not on the nightly cycle. A refresh can change a listing — an admission label flipping to ticketed once a ticket page exists, a blank start time filling in — but it never overwrites a detail an owner entered, or replaces a confirmed time with a weaker source's guess.

The same gig routinely appears in three places at once — the venue's site, a ticketing platform and a regional guide — with different spellings and sometimes different times. Listings are matched on venue, date and artist, then merged into one entry keeping the strongest evidence from each: the venue's time, the ticketing platform's price and link.

Duplicate venues are harder, because sources disagree about which town a venue is in — one pub can be recorded three times under a village, a suburb and a city name. Those merge only against external evidence such as a shared Eircode or street address, never because two names match: plenty of genuinely different Irish venues share a name. Same caution for artists.

A venue can also legitimately run two shows in one day. A matinee and an evening performance far enough apart stay separate listings rather than collapsing into one.

Facebook.A great deal of Irish pub music is only announced on Facebook, and it is not a source we can use — its pages aren't accessible to us programmatically and there is no sanctioned route to those listings. So we go to venue websites instead, and accept that some Facebook-only gigs won't appear. If that is how your venue announces music, claim your profile and add the dates yourself.

Scraping around an API. Where a platform offers an official API, we use the API rather than its website.

Guesses.No inferred prices, no assumed start times, no “probably free because there is no ticket link”. Our editorial standards set out the rules in full.

Paid placement. No listing is added, ranked or promoted because someone paid for it.

Coverage spans all 32 counties, north and south, and is strongest where venues publish their own calendars — cities, larger towns, and any venue on a box-office system. It is thinnest in exactly the places that make Irish music special: the rural pub with a session every Thursday that has never published a listing anywhere.

So a venue with a calendar gets every date listed. A venue with music seven nights a week and no calendar can only be listed as a place that hosts regular music — we won't invent individual events for it, so ring ahead. If a venue stops publishing, its listings thin out rather than being filled in from memory. A listing is only ever as current as its source, which is why the venue or promoter is the final word.