Please, Let Me Subscribe To Your Calendar

Now, I'm sure the knee-jerk reaction to this will be "oh but you're OLD, no one cares about such things these days" but hear me out. It seems that if there is any way to "discover" events happening anywhere these days is to either follow a bunch of pages on Facebook, sign up to a pile of e-mail lists or download one or more of the predatory ticketing apps like Ticketmaster or Eventbrite.

Let me be 100% clear to venue owners and promoters, I know you have to cater to these, but all of these mechanisms suck. I don't have social media but my friends who do will at best get 1 out of 100 events surfaced by the algorithm. I can't tell you how many times we've missed shows because it just wasn't surfaced. Your e-mail announcements will almost certainly be ignored. Even though I don't use either of the e-mail duopolies and therefore generally don't have e-mail that I asked for go to my Spam folder I still find that event announcements almost never arrive at the intersection of I am in the mood to read them and I am looking for something to do. Because of that I just don't subscribe to mailing lists. For the same reason that e-mail doesn't work, the ticket apps don't work. I mean, again being an old tech person, I don't actually allow any of those apps to actually notify me of anything and I only open them to buy tickets or to get into events but I would imagine that most of the time the attention-seeking notifications would frequently show up when I just don't care.

You know what was created for such use-cases? A motherfucking calendar. If you are doing events, your website (which you should have) needs one and for the love of "Bob" please please please let me subscribe to it. I have been spending too much time writing scrapers to transform webpages into iCal files that I put on my website because club owners/promoters won't do me the solid. As a result I think we've been to 3x as many shows in the last few years as prior because I can scroll through my phone and see all the events happening at my leisure, right there in a familiar chronological display.

I ran into a random Weird Al show last week because I saw it on my calendar.

Please, let me subscribe to your calendar.