How this agenda is put together

What gets listed, and what Manchester has no public feed for

Start with the absence, because it shapes the rest. Several cities on this site are built partly on a public cultural agenda that a council or a regional government publishes openly — Barcelona's and the Basque Country's are credited by name on their own methodology pages, because their licences ask for it. Manchester has no equivalent behind these pages. There is no municipal open-data events feed here carrying the free, daytime and neighbourhood programming, so nothing on these pages comes from one, and this page will not imply otherwise.

The first layer is therefore the venues themselves: nightlife and live programming from a curated roster of Manchester rooms — the club rooms, the independent live circuit, the large touring rooms, the seasonal spaces, and the rooms in Salford, Stockport and the other Greater Manchester towns that this city treats as its own.

The second is the city's ticketed layer — club nights and gigs as the ticketing platform behind a large share of them publishes them. It is the layer that carries door times and ticket links, and it is genuinely good at that. What it is not is the whole city: one platform's catalogue is one platform's catalogue, and a night that sells somewhere else is a night it does not have. This page does not pretend that a ticketed feed and a city's night are the same set.

Everything is taken as its operators publish it. Nothing is retyped by hand, nothing is written by us, and no venue pays to appear or to rank higher. If a detail is not in the venue's own announcement, it does not appear on the card.

Where we draw Manchester

Wider than the city boundary, deliberately, and narrower than the whole county. The rule is a ten-mile radius around the centre, which in practice is Greater Manchester and the towns people actually cross between on a single night out. Salford is a separate city and it starts a few minutes' walk from the centre; Stockport and Didsbury are inside the same ring. Treating Salford as a different city would describe the night worse, not better.

That radius is a stated rule rather than a finished list, and the difference is worth being straight about: which towns sit inside it is settled by the distance, not by a roster on this page, and no town-by-town coverage claim is made here. What does follow from it is practical. A room in Stockport and a room in the centre are the same city for the purposes of what is on and not the same city for the purposes of getting home, so the room's own name on a listing is worth reading before you go rather than after.

How often it refreshes

Several times a day, not once overnight. That is the entire point: a night announced in the early evening has a shelf life of hours, and a page rebuilt once a day cannot carry it. Checking again through the day is also how corrections and reposts get picked up.

It matters more in Manchester than in most places, because this city's week moves twice a year. The Warehouse Project season runs from mid-September to New Year's Day and a hundred thousand students arrive inside one September fortnight, so a listing built from last month's rhythm is wrong for a good part of the calendar. The clocks changing on 25 October moves the early evening again.

What unconfirmed means

Announcements are often ambiguous. Dates get abbreviated, posters omit the year, and a recap of last weekend can look a lot like an announcement for this one. When a detail cannot be established with confidence — most often the date — the event is labelled unconfirmed rather than presented as fact.

One case is specific to a ticketed feed and worth naming, because it is the one that would look most like a mistake. A residency or a long run is often published under the date the run started rather than the date of the next night, which can put a date from a year or two ago at the top of a list sorted by time. Rows like that are treated as runs and either resolved to a real night or left out, rather than shown as if something were on tonight that is not.

Treat an unconfirmed listing as a lead worth checking, not a promise. Where the source publishes a page for it, the card links straight back so you can check it yourself before crossing the city.

How this is paid for

Some ticket links earn a commission. It changes nothing about what is listed or the order it appears in — the agenda is ordered by time, and the headline pick by its own score, with no commercial weighting in either. A note in the footer of every page says so, and each commercial link carries rel="sponsored".

Where a link is not a commercial one, it is the room's own link, passed through unchanged and unwrapped. That is the majority of what is on this site, and it stays that way whether or not a night happens to be one we earn on.

Corrections and removals

If you run a venue and you are not here, something is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write to brandonbevans@gmail.com — that request is honoured promptly. Listings link back to your own announcement and follow what you publish, so edits on your side flow through here.