by Jana Spivey | Jun 9, 2026 | Blog
NIVA's State of Live report named marketing the top challenge nationwide. Here's why it's true, why it's been true for a while, and what's genuinely starting to shift.
The NIVA State of Live report identified marketing and audience-building as the number one challenge for independent venues nationwide. When I first read that finding, I wasn't surprised.
Independent venues are structurally disadvantaged in marketing in a way that has nothing to do with effort or intention. The teams are small, budgets are tight, and the expertise required to navigate a landscape that includes paid search, organic SEO, AI visibility, social media, email, and ticketing platform relationships is genuinely broad. Nobody expects a two-person venue marketing operation to be excellent at all of it. The problem is that the industry hasn't had a good answer for what to do instead.
THE CHALLENGE RUNS DEEPER THAN MARKETING
There's a specific dynamic that makes venue marketing harder than marketing for most other local businesses. A restaurant can build a consistent audience because its product is consistent. A venue's product changes with every show. You're not selling "the venue" over and over; you're selling a different event every night to audiences that may have significant overlap or almost none, depending on the genre and the artist.
That variability makes algorithmic discovery harder. Social platforms reward consistent content and growing engagement; venue content is inherently episodic. SEO rewards stable, evergreen pages; venue events have a shelf life measured in weeks. Email works well when your list is engaged, but venue email lists often have dormant subscribers from past events who don't care about the next one.
I worked with a client last year that had a professional practice with a consistent offer and a defined patient profile.Even there, with every possible marketing advantage of consistency, the attribution and discovery challenges were significant. I spent months building their campaign analysis, tracking conversions manually because the CRM wasn't capturing UTMs reliably, and untangling what was actually driving new clients versus what the platform wanted to report as success. For a venue with variable events and a wider audience profile, those challenges are compounded considerably.
"You're not selling the venue over and over. You're selling a different event every few weeks to audiences that may have almost nothing in common."
WHY AI CHANGES THIS EQUATION, AT LEAST PARTIALLY
For all the uncertainty surrounding AI, I believe it has the potential to solve some of the challenges independent venues have faced for years.
First, AI search is better at nuance than keyword search was. A fan asking "where can I see indie folk music in a small venue with good sound in Denver" is describing a venue specifically. Keyword-based search struggled to match that level of detail; AI handles it naturally. Venues that are genuinely distinctive now have a better chance of being found by fans who are a genuine fit, rather than being drowned out by larger venues with bigger SEO budgets.
Second, the infrastructure changes that improve AI visibility (schema markup, citation consistency, accurate platform listings, a readable website) tend to be one-time investments with compounding returns. You build it once; it works for every show after that. That's a different economics than paying to boost every event post on Instagram.
Third, the playing field is more level than it looks. The big venue operators haven't figured this out either. Most of them are sitting on the same Squarespace sites, the same JavaScript-heavy event widgets, the same inconsistent citation profiles as the independents. The venues that move first on AI visibility aren't competing against a polished incumbent; they're competing against collective inertia.
SIX THINGS THAT ARE ACTUALLY STARTING TO CHANGE
- AI discovery rewards specificity. The niche venue, the one with a distinct identity and a genuine community, is better positioned for AI citation than a generic multipurpose space.
- Platform consolidation is creating clearer infrastructure. Bandsintown's expanded reach into Apple Music, Spotify, and Google means there's now a single platform that distributes to most of the surfaces fans use, and venues can access it directly.
- Schema markup is getting easier to implement. WordPress plugins handle most of it; even Squarespace has limited support via code injection. The technical barrier is lower than it was two years ago.
- The antitrust verdict against Live Nation opens a door. If the states' remedies push succeeds and ticketing exclusivity contracts are limited, venues will have more flexibility in how they distribute and promote events. That flexibility matters for marketing.
- Owned channels are having a genuine moment. As algorithmic platforms get noisier and less reliable for reach, venues with healthy email and SMS lists are finding that direct communication converts better than it has in years. Fans who opt in want to hear from you.
- The knowledge required is becoming more accessible. A year ago, almost nobody was writing practically about AI visibility for venues. The information exists now; acting on it is the advantage.
The marketing challenge is real and the NIVA report is right to name it. But the conditions that made it so intractable for so long are shifting, and the venues paying attention right now are building an advantage that will be harder to close in two years than it is today.
by Jana Spivey | Jun 9, 2026 | Blog
AI is good at a lot of things. Generating vendor audit questions when you don't have the context to evaluate the answers is not one of them. Here's what genuine marketing agency accountability actually looks like.
I want to tell you about someone I'll call John.
John runs an independent venue. He'd been working with a solid marketing team for a while, including an excellent developer and a digital ads manager who knew his account well. Things were working reasonably well; the relationship was functional and the results were defensible.
Then John discovered AI. Specifically, he discovered that he could describe his situation to ChatGPT and ask it to help him evaluate his vendors. So he did. He fed it his monthly reports, described his frustrations, explained what he was spending, and asked ChatGPT whether he was getting a good deal.
ChatGPT gave him a lot of questions to ask. Long, detailed, technically framed questions. The kind of questions that, on the surface, looked like serious vendor accountability. John sent them.
The problem was that the questions weren't actually the right questions for his situation. They were generic, generated from a description John had provided. His prompt included his frustrations and suspicions but not the full context of what his vendors were doing or why. Some of the questions misunderstood how the platforms worked. Some accused the vendor of practices that weren't happening. And some were so laden with implication that they couldn't be answered without the vendor feeling they were defending themselves against charges that hadn't been stated directly.
John's developer, who had been doing excellent work for years, got a message so hostile in tone that he stepped away. The ads manager, who had real knowledge of the account, disengaged rather than try to respond to questions that didn't map to reality. John was left with a clean slate and no team, which he experienced as a victory right up until he had to rebuild from scratch.
I'm sharing this story because I've seen versions of it more than once. AI is a powerful tool for a lot of things. Generating vendor audit questions when you don't yet have the foundation to evaluate the answers is not one of them.
"The questions looked like serious accountability. They weren't the right questions for his situation, and he couldn't evaluate the answers he got."
WHAT AI ACTUALLY CAN'T DO IN THIS CONTEXT
AI can tell you what questions a sophisticated client might ask a marketing agency in general. It cannot tell you whether your specific vendor is doing those things well, poorly, or at all, because it doesn't have access to your account, your industry benchmarks, your conversion data, or the context behind the numbers in your report. It's working from what you tell it, and what you tell it is shaped by what you already believe.
If you're frustrated with your vendor and you feed that frustration into an AI prompt, the output will reflect your frustration back at you in formal language. That's not analysis. It's amplification.
THE QUESTIONS THAT ARE ACTUALLY WORTH ASKING
Genuine marketing agency accountability doesn't require AI. It requires knowing what your campaign is supposed to accomplish and whether the report in front of you reflects progress toward that. A few questions that belong in every monthly review, regardless of channel:
- What is the campaign optimizing toward, and is that the action I actually care about? (Clicks and impressions are not the same as ticket sales or inquiry submissions.)
- What did we spend last month, what did we get for it, and how does that compare to the prior period and to the same period last year?
- What changed in the campaign this month, and why?
- What's not working, and what's the plan for it?
- Are there things I could look at directly if I wanted to verify this myself?
That last question matters. A good vendor will say yes and show you where. A vendor who can't answer it, or who responds with defensiveness rather than transparency, is telling you something worth knowing.
WHEN SOMETHING GENUINELY IS WRONG
Sometimes the concern is legitimate. Vendor underperformance is real; so is billing for work that wasn't done, reporting that obscures rather than reveals, and campaigns built around the vendor's ease rather than your results. Those things happen and they deserve to be addressed directly.
The right response to a genuine concern is a direct conversation: "Here's what I'm seeing, here's what I expected, help me understand the gap." Not a list of AI-generated audit questions. Not a formal review document built on assumptions. A conversation, with your actual numbers, with someone who has access to the same account you're paying for.
If you genuinely can't tell whether your marketing agency is doing good work, that's a real problem, but the solution isn't to weaponize AI against them. The solution is to get a second opinion from someone who can actually look at your account. A one-time audit from a qualified independent reviewer will tell you more than a hundred AI-generated questions.
Post 12 steps back from the vendor relationship and looks at the bigger picture: why marketing is the number one challenge for independent venues nationwide, and what's actually starting to change.
by Jana Spivey | Jun 9, 2026 | Blog
Most Google Ads campaigns for venues are structured to benefit the platform, not the venue. Here's what's actually happening and how to fix it.
I've been managing Google Ads campaigns for more than a decade, including time on the agency side at Microsoft Bing Ads working with major brand accounts. I've hired and evaluated dozens of Google Ads managers over that time. And in that decade, across every industry I've worked in, the same pattern shows up with remarkable consistency:
Most Google Ads accounts are being managed in a way that benefits the platform more than the business paying for it.
That's not an accident (or laziness!). Google's advertising platform is designed to spend your budget. The default recommendations, automated bid strategies, broad match settings, and Smart Campaigns are all engineered to maximize spend. A manager who follows Google's defaults without pushing back is not managing your account; they're approving Google's preferences on your behalf.
For venues, this is compounded by an industry where Google Ads expertise is genuinely rare. Most venue marketing budgets touch Google Ads at some point but very few have someone at the wheel who knows the account at the granular level.
WHAT CHANGED (AND WHY IT MATTERS NOW)
Google's AI model family, Gemini 3, launched in November 2025, and Google has been folding it more deeply into Smart Bidding ever since. That part isn't in dispute. What Google has actually named and documented, on its own Ads and Commerce Blog, are specific features: journey-aware bidding, Smart Bidding Exploration, and demand-led pacing, rolled out in phases through 2026. There's no single branded "bidding infrastructure" Google has announced; the honest version is that the underlying AI has been getting more capable and more central to how bids get set, in named, incremental steps, not one clean cutover.
What is true, and worth taking seriously regardless of the specific mechanism: accounts going through any bidding system transition tend to do better when they have clean conversion tracking, strong negative keyword lists, and campaign structures built around real business goals instead of Google's default templates. If your Google Ads performance shifted in ways you can't explain sometime in the last year, that's worth investigating on its own terms, not because a specific "Gemini 3 transition" definitely caused it, but because messy tracking and default settings make any account more exposed when the underlying systems change.
THE THINGS THAT DRAIN VENUE BUDGETS
Here are the specific things that I commonly see wasting spend:
- Broad match keywords without tight negative lists. Broad match tells Google to show your ad for any query it considers related to your keyword. Without aggressive negative keywords, that means your "live music venue Nashville" campaign may be spending on searches for "live music streaming Nashville," "Nashville venue wedding DJ," or "Nashville venues for rent furniture." All technically related; none of them the customer you want.
- Smart Campaigns and Performance Max without proper exclusions. These campaign types are designed for advertisers who want to hand control to Google entirely. They can work but they can also burn through budget on irrelevant placements with no transparency about where the money went. For most venues, a well-structured Search campaign with manual or target CPA bidding will outperform a set-it-and-forget-it Performance Max campaign.
- Conversion tracking that doesn't match business reality. If your campaign is optimizing toward a conversion action that doesn't actually reflect a customer, you're training Google's algorithm on the wrong signal. For venues, this often means optimizing for page visits or form opens rather than actual ticket purchases or inquiry submissions.
- No geographic or daypart controls. Are your ads running at 3am in cities three states away with no prospect of that fan driving to your venue? Default settings often say yes. These are easy wins that many accounts haven't addressed.
WHAT STILL WORKS, AND FOR WHOM
Google Ads isn't inherently wrong for venues but it's not doing you any favors when the account is set up wrong and left alone. The campaigns that consistently deliver for venues tend to be built around specific, high-intent queries rather than broad category terms. They have conversion tracking tied to a real action (ticket purchase, box office call, inquiry form submission), they're reviewed and adjusted monthly by someone who reads the search term report, and the budget is set with an honest view of what a new customer is actually worth.
For ticketed events specifically, Google Ads can be effective when you're promoting a specific show with a defined date and a known ticket price. You know your audience, you know your geography, you know your conversion window. That's a manageable campaign with a measurable return. A perpetual "live music venue Nashville" campaign running at $500 a month with default settings and no conversion tracking is not.
The question to ask your current manager, or yourself: what is the campaign optimizing toward, and how do we know when it's working? If the answer is impressions, clicks, or a Google-recommended metric you don't fully understand, that's the conversation to have before you spend another dollar.
Post 11 goes a level deeper on this, specifically on how to read your vendor's monthly report without either taking it at face value or going off the rails trying to audit it with tools you weren't given a foundation to use.
by Jana Spivey | Jun 8, 2026 | Blog
Zero click doesn't mean zero discovery. It means the discovery happened somewhere you can't see, and whether your venue was part of it comes down to infrastructure.
Zero click searches have been part of the SEO conversation for years. The basic concept isn't new: Google answers the question directly on the results page, the user gets what they need, nobody clicks through to a website. For a long time, featured snippets, knowledge panels, weather results, and sports scores have been sending clicks to zero.
What changed is the scale. AI Overviews have extended the zero-click experience to categories of queries that used to reliably drive traffic. Discovery searches, informational queries, local recommendations: these now frequently get answered before the user ever sees a link list. The 60% figure is current and well-documented; on some query categories, particularly local and informational, the number is significantly higher.
60% of searches currently end without a click to any website. For local discovery queries, the share is higher. The fan found an answer; they just didn't find it on your site.
For venue operators who have been thinking about digital marketing primarily in terms of website traffic, this is a real adjustment. But the right response isn't despair, and it isn't ignoring the data. It's reframing what success looks like.
THE GOAL SHIFTS FROM RANK TO CITED
In the old model, you ranked for a keyword, someone clicked your link, they arrived on your site, and you had a chance to convert them. Website traffic was the proxy for visibility.
In the new model, a fan asks a question and gets an AI-generated answer. If your venue is named in that answer, described accurately, and associated with a ticket link or a call to action, the fan may go directly to buy a ticket without your website ever being involved in the discovery step. You were visible; the visibility just didn't look like a pageview.
This is a genuinely different way of thinking about what it means to be found. The metric that matters isn't "did they visit my site," it's "did AI mention me when it was relevant to." And the way you influence that is through everything the last five posts have covered: crawlable content, accurate schema, consistent citations, active platform listings, a well-maintained GBP.
"The metric that matters isn't did they visit my site. It's did AI mention me when it was relevant to."
WHAT ZERO-CLICK ACTUALLY MEANS FOR A VENUE'S BUSINESS
Here's where I want to be careful, because the doom framing of zero click searches doesn't fully apply to the venue context. A fan who asks "what's a good venue for live jazz in my city" and gets an AI answer naming your venue hasn't been lost. They've been found. The AI did the discovery work. What happens next (whether they follow the ticket link, search your name directly, or ask a follow-up question) is now your conversion problem, not your visibility problem.
The venues that actually lose in a zero-click world are the ones who aren't cited. The ones whose event data is locked inside a JavaScript widget, whose GBP hasn't been touched in two years, whose name appears four different ways across the platforms AI is reading. Those venues are invisible in the answer, and invisible in a zero-click world means genuinely not discovered.
The practical response to zero click searches for a venue isn't to mourn the traffic loss. It's to make sure that when AI generates an answer about live events in your city, your venue is in it, your information is right, and there's a clear path to a ticket.
A FEW THINGS THAT EARN CITATIONS CONSISTENTLY
- Being named and described accurately on high-authority platforms (Bandsintown, Yelp, Google, TripAdvisor, local press), because AI cites what credible sources corroborate
- Having Event schema on your site so Google can pull your specific shows into its answers, not just a general mention of your venue
- Writing content on your site that answers the kinds of questions fans actually ask, because AI cites pages that directly answer queries
- Keeping your GBP events current, because Google's own data is a high-trust source for its own AI
The honest caveat: I can't promise any of this fully replaces the organic search traffic that AI Mode is taking from venue websites. Some of that traffic is genuinely gone. What I can tell you is that venues with the right infrastructure in place will be cited more often than those without it, and cited is the new ranked.
Post 10 shifts to paid search, where the same AI transition is happening and where a lot of venues are quietly spending money on campaigns that haven't been reconsidered since the underlying platform changed underneath them.
by Jana Spivey | Jun 8, 2026 | Blog
Bandsintown, Google Events, Eventbrite, Songkick: here's which platforms are actually feeding AI your show data and which ones aren't doing what you think.
Your website is one place AI can learn about your events. It's not the only place, and for a lot of venues it's not even the most effective place, especially if you're on a JavaScript-heavy platform that AI crawlers can't fully read.
There's a whole ecosystem of platforms that feed event data directly into the search and discovery tools your fans are using. Some of them are obvious. Some of them have changed significantly in the last year in ways that make them more important than ever. And at least one of them has a ChatGPT integration that sounds more useful than it actually is.
Let's go through the landscape honestly.
THE LAYER MOST VENUES DON'T THINK ABOUT
BANDSINTOWN PRO
This is the one I'd start with if you haven't already. Bandsintown is the underlying event data feed for an extraordinary number of platforms. Apple Music, Spotify, Google, Shazam, Microsoft Bing, and YouTube all pull live event data from Bandsintown.
As of early 2026, Spotify ended its 13-year partnership with Songkick and switched its event listings to Bandsintown. Apple Music just launched a full concert listings feature powered by Bandsintown. That's a lot of surfaces where your shows can appear automatically once your venue is in the system. Bandsintown Pro is the venue-side product; it's how you manage your listings and get them into that distribution network. The interface isn't the most elegant thing you'll ever use, but the reach behind it is real.
GOOGLE EVENTS
When Google can read your event data, whether from your own site's schema markup, your Google Business Profile events, or a platform that feeds Google directly, it surfaces events in a dedicated "Events" unit in search results. This unit appears for searches like "concerts near me this weekend" and can show your venue's shows alongside ticket links. It's distinct from the AI Overview and the local pack; it's its own format, and it pulls from structured event data. Venues that have Event schema on their site or post to their GBP events regularly are eligible for this placement.
SONGKICK
Songkick is artist-facing rather than venue-facing; it's owned by Warner Music Group and is primarily a tool artists use to manage their tour dates and notify fans. Venues benefit indirectly when artists listing shows at your venue keep their Songkick profiles current. Worth knowing about, but not a platform where venues have direct control over their listings.
EVENTBRITE
Eventbrite events are generally crawlable by search engines, because Eventbrite builds its own listing pages with static HTML rather than the widget-only approach. That means a show listed on Eventbrite has its own URL, its own page, and its own chance to appear in search results and AI answers, independent of whether your venue's site is readable. If you're already using Eventbrite for ticketing, the discovery benefit is a side effect you may not have been taking advantage of intentionally.
TICKETMASTER AND THE CHATGPT INTEGRATION
Ticketmaster added itself to the ChatGPT App Directory in early 2026, which generated a fair amount of coverage. The practical reality is more limited than the headline suggests. The ChatGPT App Directory requires users to be on a paid plan and to deliberately connect the Ticketmaster app to their account. It doesn't activate automatically in searches. In our own testing, searching for venue recommendations in ChatGPT didn't surface Ticketmaster results; it surfaced Bandsintown, local blogs, and editorial sources instead. The integration exists and will presumably improve, but it's not yet a reliable discovery channel for most venues.
"Bandsintown is the underlying feed for Apple Music, Spotify, Google, Shazam, Bing, and YouTube. That's not a niche platform. That's most of how events get discovered."
WHERE SHOULD YOU SPEND YOUR TIME?
You don't need to be on every platform. You do need to be on the ones that feed the tools your fans actually use. Given the current landscape, that prioritization looks something like this:
- Bandsintown Pro, because of its distribution reach across Apple, Spotify, Google, Bing, and Shazam
- Google Business Profile events, because Google is still the dominant search platform and this is direct input into both traditional and AI results
- Event schema on your own site, if your site is accessible to crawlers, because it feeds Google Events directly and supports AI Overview citations
- Eventbrite, if you're already using it for ticketing, because the discovery benefit comes essentially for free
The thread connecting all of this: every platform where your event data lives accurately and consistently is another place AI can confirm that your venue is real, active, and worth recommending. It compounds. The venues with three well-maintained data sources are more visible than the ones with twelve inconsistent ones.
Post 9 steps back from the infrastructure to ask a harder question: what does any of this mean when more than half of searches never result in a click at all?
