Open any event discovery platform, social media feed, or ticketing app and the events you see are algorithmically curated. AI decides which events appear in your feed, which get recommended in emails, and which show up when you search. For event promoters, this algorithmic gatekeeping is increasingly determining who finds out about their shows.

This matters enormously, and most of the industry isn’t paying enough attention to it.

How event recommendation works

The AI behind event recommendations operates on roughly the same principles as music or content recommendation. It analyses your past behaviour — events attended, tickets purchased, pages viewed, social media activity — and predicts what you’re likely to be interested in next.

When it works well, it’s genuinely useful. You get shown events that match your interests without having to search for them. The friction between “I want to go to something” and “I found something to go to” is reduced.

When it works poorly — which is often — it creates filter bubbles that narrow your discovery to things that are similar to what you’ve already done. Went to three rock shows? Here are twenty more rock shows. Never mind the incredible jazz night or the spoken word event happening at the venue next door.

The promoter impact

For promoters of mainstream, well-established events, algorithmic recommendation is generally positive. Their events have the data footprint — large audiences, high engagement, extensive purchase history — that feeds the algorithms what they need to make confident recommendations.

For promoters of niche, emerging, or novel events, the picture is different. An event that’s never happened before has no historical data for the algorithm to work with. A new genre night, an experimental performance, a first-time festival — these events are invisible to recommendation systems because there’s no signal for the algorithm to amplify.

This creates a structural bias toward the established and the familiar. The events that need discovery the most — because they’re new, different, or serving underrepresented audiences — are the ones least likely to be surfaced by algorithmic recommendation.

What platforms are doing

Some platforms are aware of this problem and are implementing editorial curation alongside algorithmic recommendation. A human curator who spots an interesting new event and features it prominently can counterbalance the algorithm’s conservative tendencies.

Ticketing platforms are also experimenting with “discovery” features that deliberately surface events outside a user’s usual pattern. “Because you liked X, you might want to try something completely different: Y” is a harder recommendation to make algorithmically, but it’s a more interesting one.

Working with firms offering AI strategy support, some Australian event platforms are exploring hybrid approaches that combine collaborative filtering (what similar users attended) with content-based recommendation (what the event is about) and editorial input (what’s genuinely noteworthy).

What promoters can do

Understanding how algorithms work gives promoters practical tools to improve their visibility:

Optimise your event listings. Rich, detailed event descriptions with relevant keywords help algorithms categorise and recommend your event accurately. Generic descriptions (“a great night out”) give the algorithm nothing to work with.

Build data signals early. The more engagement your event generates before it happens — social media interaction, page views, “interested” clicks — the more signals the algorithm has to work with. Start building visibility well before tickets go on sale.

Email marketing still works. Your own email list is the one channel you control completely, free from algorithmic gatekeeping. A well-maintained, properly segmented email list remains one of the most effective tools for reaching your audience directly.

Cross-promote with complementary events. If your audience overlaps with another event’s audience, cross-promotion creates data associations that algorithms can pick up. This is particularly effective for niche events that struggle with algorithmic visibility on their own.

The bigger picture

The shift from human-curated event discovery (street press, word of mouth, venue listings) to algorithmic discovery is one of the most significant changes in how audiences find live events. It’s mostly invisible — people don’t think about why a particular event appeared in their feed — but its effects on what gets promoted, who attends, and which events survive are substantial.

The industry needs to engage with this shift actively, not passively. Understanding the algorithms, working within their constraints, and advocating for discovery mechanisms that support diversity and novelty are all part of the modern promoter’s job.

The alternative is a live events landscape where the algorithm decides what you see, and the rich diversity that makes Australian live entertainment special gradually narrows to whatever the data says will perform best. That’s a future nobody should want.