33,000 Venues, One Home

This is the one we're proudest of technically, and it started with a genuinely dull question: where does a band even find out if a venue is any good before they say yes to a gig there?

The answer, it turns out, is nowhere. So we pulled in real address and location data for over 33,000 UK live music venues from OpenStreetMap (pubs, function rooms, arts centres, the lot) and gave every single one its own page: a real address, directions, and every upcoming gig booked there pulled straight from bands' own diaries. Venues can claim their page for free and add their own detail on top.

Thirty-three thousand of anything is a genuinely different kind of engineering problem than “a website for one band.” You can't just load a list that size onto a page and hope for the best. It needs proper pagination, proper search, and (a lesson we learned the expensive way a few weeks later, more on that in a future post) proper caching, or your database quietly falls over from sheer repetition, not from too many real visitors.

No other platform we could find has matched this at anywhere near this scale for UK venues specifically. That's either a genuinely defensible moat or a sign nobody else thought it was worth the bother. We're betting on the former.