Events

The second-largest live-music promoter worldwide and the principal counterweight to Live Nation, promoting global tours, operating clubs and theaters, and producing major festivals through subsidiaries including Goldenvoice. Paired with the AXS ticketing platform to give it an independent promotion-to-ticketing chain.

A multi-weekend destination music festival held in Zilker Park in Austin, produced by C3 Presents and connected to the long-running Austin City Limits television and venue brands. A working example of tiered pass structures, weekend-one and weekend-two inventory, VIP and platinum tiers, and travel-package selling.

AEG's ticketing platform and the primary alternative to Ticketmaster at major arenas, theaters, festivals and clubs. Known for encrypted rotating mobile tickets aimed at limiting fraud and unauthorized resale, an official fan-to-fan resale channel, and tight integration with AEG-operated venues and Goldenvoice festivals.

A concert discovery service that tracks a fan's listening and followed artists and alerts them when those acts play nearby, distributing listings across streaming services, social platforms and its own app. On the supply side it gives artists and their teams a promotional platform and audience data, making it a key upstream discovery surface rather than a ticket seller.

The dominant music-industry publication, covering touring and live business alongside recorded music, with Billboard Boxscore reporting on tour grosses and attendance. The mainstream-visible authority whose coverage shapes how live-business stories reach a general audience.

Trade media for event producers and experiential marketers, covering event design, brand activations, catering, venues and production with heavy visual case-study coverage. The go-to source for what a well-executed brand event actually looks like.

An event operating system for in-person, virtual and hybrid B2B events: registration and ticketing, website builder, agenda and speaker management, onsite check-in and smart badges, sponsor and exhibitor tools, and analytics that feed marketing automation and CRM. Positions on attendee data flowing back into the revenue stack.

Austin-headquartered promoter and festival producer, best known for producing Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits Music Festival and for exporting festival formats to international markets. Also promotes tours and operates venues, and its Austin base makes the city a production and talent center for destination festivals well beyond its own market size.

The enterprise standard for meetings and events management: registration, venue sourcing through a large supplier marketplace, room blocks and housing, event apps, onsite check-in and badging, attendee engagement and analytics. Serves corporate meeting programs, associations and hospitality suppliers on both the planner and venue side.

Mobile-first ticketing built around a discovery app with personalized recommendations, and a no-secondary-market stance enforced through non-transferable mobile tickets and an official waiting list that returns unwanted tickets at face value. Strong with independent venues, clubs and electronic music, and positioned explicitly as the anti-scalping alternative.

A long-established independent ticketing provider for clubs, theaters, performing-arts venues, fairs, festivals and haunted attractions, with box-office, access-control and marketing tools. Serves the independent venue market that prefers not to be inside a major promoter's ecosystem.

Publication and research arm focused on experiential marketing: brand activations, sponsorship strategy, measurement, agency rankings and the Ex Awards. The primary authority on how sponsors evaluate and buy event presence.

Self-service ticketing and registration for independent organizers — classes, workshops, community events, food and drink, small music and business events — paired with a consumer discovery marketplace and app. Positions on speed of setup, free tickets at no cost, and organic distribution through its own audience, making it the default entry point for the long tail of events that never touch a promoter.

The US-facing ticketing operation of CTS Eventim, Europe's largest ticketing group and a major live-entertainment promoter and venue operator. Serves festivals, tours, venues, attractions and museums with white-label storefronts that keep the organizer's brand in front of the buyer, and absorbed the See Tickets US business, whose domain now redirects here. The clearest European counterpart to the integrated promoter-plus-ticketing model, and the main non-incumbent option for US independent festivals with international reach.

A discovery platform for local experiences that also originates and produces its own formats — immersive exhibitions, candlelight concert series, themed dining and pop-ups — and scales them across dozens of cities. Notable for treating audience data as the input to what gets produced next, blurring the line between marketplace and promoter.

An Austin-based ticketing provider specializing in music festivals, venues and multi-day events, including payment plans, camping and travel add-ons and festival-scale access control. Its Austin roots trace directly to the city's festival production cluster.

Google's implementation guidelines for Event markup: required and recommended properties, date and time-zone formatting, offers and availability, handling of cancelled, postponed and online events, multi-day and multi-session guidance, and eligibility rules for event experiences in search results. The operative spec for whether an event listing is actually surfaced.

The association for exhibition and trade show organizers, publishing show-management guidance, the CEM certification, and research on exhibition performance. Runs Expo! Expo!, the annual meeting where show organizers and suppliers set practice for the exhibition sector.

The professional association for managers of arenas, stadiums, convention centers, performing-arts venues, amphitheaters and fairgrounds. Publishes venue operations guidance, safety and security standards, certification programs and benchmarking data, and runs sector conferences for venue professionals.

The global association for the international meetings industry, best known for its rankings of countries and cities by number of international association meetings hosted, and for its database of rotating association congresses. The reference source for destination competition in the congress market.

The leading international live-music business publication, covering promoters, agents, festivals, ticketing and venues with a stronger European and global perspective than the US trades. Also produces industry conferences and reports on ticketing regulation and market structure.

The largest live-entertainment company in the world, combining concert promotion, venue ownership and operation, festivals, artist management and Ticketmaster in a single vertically integrated group. Promotes tens of thousands of shows a year across owned and third-party venues, and its integration of promotion, venues and ticketing is the specific structure at issue in US antitrust litigation.

Fast, well-designed event pages, invitations, RSVPs and paid ticketing aimed at startups, tech communities, creators and recurring calendars. Its calendar-subscription and host-network model has made it the default for community and conference-adjacent side events, where speed to publish matters more than enterprise features.

The platform for recurring, community-organized in-person gatherings — tech and professional groups, hobby and outdoor clubs, language exchanges, social meetups — organized around groups and repeat attendance rather than one-off ticket sales. Owns a large share of the free and low-cost local-event discovery market.

One of the largest meeting and event industry associations, providing certification, chapter networks, education and its Meetings Outlook research on industry conditions, budgets and hiring. A primary source for planner-side benchmarks and contracting practice.

The trade association representing independent music venues, promoters and festivals in the US, formed during the pandemic shutdown and now a policy voice on ticketing transparency, resale, bot legislation and market concentration. A key counterweight in the regulatory debate and a source for the independent sector's economics.

The leading association for business-events strategists and meeting professionals, with education, certification, research and the Convening Leaders conference. Its research on attendee behavior, event design and the value of business events is standard citation material for the meetings sector.

The trade publication of record for the concert business, publishing tour routing, box-office grosses and attendance data, venue and promoter rankings, and industry news. Its charts and year-end reports are the numbers the touring industry negotiates and benchmarks against.

An event marketing platform built for large enterprise flagship conferences, handling registration at scale, complex session and capacity management, content and speaker workflows, exhibitor and sponsor programs, and real-time attendee analytics fed to enterprise marketing systems.

Program and schedule management for conferences and festivals: session and speaker databases, personalized attendee schedules, room capacity management, and public schedule sites that double as indexable event content. Widely used by open-source, education and community conferences where the program is the product.

The canonical vocabulary definition for events on the web: properties for name, startDate and endDate, location, organizer, performer, offers, and the eventStatus and eventAttendanceMode enumerations, plus subtypes such as MusicEvent, Festival, BusinessEvent and ExhibitionEvent. The specification every event listing is validated against.

Operates on both sides of the market: a consumer resale marketplace known for its Deal Score value rating and all-in price display, and a primary ticketing system sold to sports teams, leagues and venues as an alternative to the incumbent. The dual model lets it pitch rights holders on capturing resale economics rather than losing them.

Business-events news, research and practical guides covering event technology, meeting design, venue and destination trends and the economics of the meetings sector, published within Skift's travel-industry newsroom. Strong on event-tech market analysis and vendor landscape reporting.

Concert tracking and discovery built on a large user-maintained database of tour dates, with artist-following alerts and syndication of listings to partner sites and apps. Long a canonical source of live-date data for the wider web, which makes accurate submission to it part of a touring act's discovery strategy.

Event marketing software focused on branded event pages, invitations, email programs and check-in, with templates that keep a large distributed program on-brand and data that syncs to marketing automation and CRM. Aimed at marketing teams running many smaller events rather than one flagship.

An end-to-end event technology suite formed from the combination of Aventri, MeetingPlay and eventcore, covering registration, venue sourcing, event apps, virtual and hybrid delivery, onsite badging and check-in, and reporting. Sells to enterprise and association programs needing one vendor across formats.

The best-known secondary marketplace for concert, sports and theater tickets, with a buyer guarantee, dynamic listing and pricing tools for sellers, and an international footprint operated alongside the viagogo brand under StubHub Holdings. Went public on the NYSE (STUB) in September 2025, which puts take rate, marketing spend and resale volumes on quarterly public record for the first time.

An event platform for trade shows, conferences and exhibitions built around AI-driven matchmaking and meeting scheduling between attendees, exhibitors and sponsors, plus agenda, networking, lead capture and exhibitor management. Widely adopted by exhibition organizers who sell meetings as a deliverable.

An annual Austin conference and festival spanning technology, film, music and culture, built on a badge model that bundles conference sessions, screenings, showcases and networking across an entire city rather than a single venue. Its community-voted PanelPicker programming, tiered badge access and sprawling unofficial-event ecosystem make it the canonical hybrid of conference and festival economics.

The dominant primary ticketing platform in North America and the consumer face of Live Nation Entertainment. Sells for arenas, amphitheaters, stadiums, theaters and festivals under long-term exclusive venue agreements, and operates presales, fan verification, queue systems, platinum market-priced inventory and platform-native resale. Its fee structure, exclusivity model and onsale performance are the reference points for the entire industry's regulatory and consumer debate.

Primary ticketing and commerce for festivals, clubs, venues and sports properties, emphasizing group and bundle purchasing, payment plans, memberships, merchandise and hospitality upsells in one cart. Positions on higher revenue per customer and organizer control of the customer relationship and data.

News, event directories and the TSNN Top Trade Shows rankings covering exhibition size, growth and organizer activity. A working reference for which shows exist in a given sector and how they are trending.

The worldwide association of trade fair organizers, venue operators and industry associations, publishing global exhibition barometer reports, market data by region, and audited-attendance standards. The primary source for cross-border exhibition industry statistics.

A large secondary marketplace for sports, concerts and theater with a loyalty rewards program, a buyer guarantee, and a substantial broker-facing business supplying listing and pricing tools to professional resellers. Competes primarily on rewards, price and breadth of sports inventory.

An all-in-one event app and registration platform aimed at academic, association and mid-market professional conferences: agenda, attendee networking and community boards, session polling and Q&A, exhibitor and sponsor tools, and lead capture. Competes on breadth at accessible price points rather than enterprise customization.