What this is

If you look up live music in most cities, you get the shows that sell tickets through a platform — the theatre, the amphitheatre, the touring act with a promoter. That is a real slice of what is happening, and it is nowhere near all of it.

The rest is on the venues' own websites. A brewery with a stage in the back that posts its month on a chalkboard photo. A corner bar with a Wednesday residency and no cover. A listening room with forty seats and a calendar page somebody updates by hand. None of that reaches a ticketing platform, so none of it reaches the sites built on top of one.

OffGrid goes to those websites directly and reads them. That is the whole idea, and it is why the name fits: this is the music that is off the grid the big platforms are built on.

How it works

Every night, a job visits the venues we have curated in each state and pulls whatever they have posted. Some venues publish a clean calendar feed. Most do not — they have a WordPress plugin, or an embedded widget, or a page of hand-typed dates. Each of those shapes gets its own reader. What comes back is filtered for actual music, de-duplicated against the aggregators, and dated in the state's own timezone.

Coverage is uneven on purpose. A state goes public here when it is genuinely worth browsing, not when it technically has rows in a database. That is why the directory says "early coverage" or "scouting" for some states instead of showing a number — a count of twelve is not a live music scene, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

Where it came from

This started in Colorado, where it now covers 289 venues and still runs at coloradobarmusic.com. That site works, so it stays where it is for now. OffGrid is the same project grown up: the same nightly scraping, pointed at the rest of the country.

It is built and run by one person who goes to these shows. If a venue is missing, or a listing is wrong, that is worth telling me about — it is the kind of thing that gets fixed the same week.