No editors. Just rules.
Every event Showbase indexes — ~5,800 future shows across Chicago, New York, Denver, and Miami — runs through the same 0-to-100 scoring function. Nothing is hand-curated; no promoter pays for placement; no affiliate link alters a score. The rules below are the rules.
The five tiers
The final 0–100 score is bucketed into one of these tiers. The badge on each card shows the tier — never the raw number (numbers invite false precision).
- Must SeeTop 10%Score ≥ 80
Top ~10% of future events across the Showbase index. These are shows where a headliner-level or established-touring artist is playing a flagship or legendary venue, the data came from a high-trust source (Resident Advisor, DICE, Ticketmaster), and the price sits in the normal range for the type of show.
- TrendingTop 20%Score ≥ 68
Top ~20% of the index (after Must See). Either a mid-size touring act in a great room, or a rising act at a flagship venue, or a top-tier artist in a smaller venue. Reliable quality, with a clear reason it caught our ranker's attention.
- SolidTop 45%Score ≥ 55
Top ~45%. The show has complete metadata (image, genre, clean title), comes from a credible source, and is at a recognized venue, but none of the individual signals rise to the Trending threshold on their own.
- StandardNext 40%Score ≥ 40
The event has enough metadata to be usable but carries no high-signal markers — no recognized artist, neither a flagship venue nor a notable source, an unusual price, or missing image. Still worth listing; just not featured.
- Low SignalBottom ~15%Score ≥ 0
Events that fail multiple quality signals at once (generic title, missing venue, suspiciously low price, spam pattern). We keep them in the raw index for debugging but never render them in rails or city lists unless you disable the 'Hide low-quality events' filter.
The seven signal groups
Every event starts at a baseline of 50. Each signal below adds or subtracts points. The sum is clamped to 0–100, then bucketed into a tier.
Artist popularity
Headliner +18, Established +12, Rising +8, Local +4
Arena-level touring acts get the biggest boost. We use a curated list of known artists with a tier on each — it's deliberately conservative. If we don't recognize an artist, we don't penalize them.
Venue reputation
Legendary +20, Flagship +15, Established +10, Known +5
Legendary = the few defining rooms (Madison Square Garden, Red Rocks, United Center). Flagship = the top-tier rooms every music city has. Established = respected mid-size. Known = smaller-but-legit. Unrecognized venues get no boost, not a penalty.
Source trust
RA +14, DICE +8, Ticketmaster +6, Venue +4, Eventbrite -6
Sources that curate (RA, DICE) score highest. Ticketmaster and direct venue feeds are trusted. Eventbrite's signal-to-noise ratio is poor so it gets a small penalty; low-quality Eventbrite listings (score < 55) are dropped entirely before ranking.
Price signals
Sweet spot $20-80 +6, Premium $80-200 +4, Excessive >$200 -2, Too low $1-10 -5, Free -3
The $20-80 range is the "real show" price band. Free and sub-$10 shows are usually DJ nights or open mics — not zero-value, but low-signal for a ranker looking for curated-headline-event quality.
Metadata completeness
Has image +8, Has genre +3, Multi-artist +3, Has time +2, No image -5
A listing with an image, genre tags, multiple artists on the bill, and a concrete start time is almost always a real, well-promoted show. The inverse is a strong negative signal.
Penalties
Generic title -35, Tribute band -8, Missing venue -25, Missing title -25
Generic-title patterns ("Networking Mixer", "Business Seminar", "Career Fair") are matched by regex and get the harshest penalty. Tribute bands are tagged but less heavily penalized. Events missing a venue or a title / artist name fail outright.
Bonus
Underground genre in non-arena venue +4
A house / techno show in a small or mid-size room gets a small bonus — it's almost always a better fit for the "underground" rail than a generic rock show at the same venue.
What we don't do
- No paid placement. Promoters can't buy a tier. No one can.
- No affiliate-driven ranking. When we wrap a ticket link with an affiliate code, we make the same number of points on a Must-See as a Low-Signal show — zero for ranking purposes, but a scraper comment in the ranking code asserts this.
- No ML. Every score is deterministic and reproducible from an event's fields. If you saw a different score yesterday, it's because the fields changed (different source, better image, cleaner title).
- No personalization in the ranker. Personalization lives in one place — the artists you follow — and it only affects which events show up in your weekly digest. It never changes a show's tier.