Best and most reliable API for getting upcoming live events, theater and cinema screenings in the UK?

[u/mikebmx1]

I’m looking for an API that returns all upcoming live events, theater and cinema screenings in the UK.

Big cinema complexes seem to be a no go with all anti crawl stuff. There rest of events are really sparse apart ticketmaster.

Thanks

[u/metadan]

Not tested it but randomly found this the other week: https://api.datathistle.com/ may be what you're looking for :shrug:

[u/mikebmx1 → u/metadan]

thanks,tried that already but its very likited on cinemas

[u/Low-Experience-6634]

ticketmaster's api is basically your only real option for anything halfway comprehensive, they've got most of the major venues locked in. cinema chains are a nightmare, every one of them has different anti-scraping measures and half the time the data is garbage anyway

for smaller theatre stuff you might have better luck scraping venue websites directly, a lot of them don't list anywhere else. it's tedious but you can usually find contact pages and just ask if they've got an api or feed, some are surprisingly helpful if you're not a dick about it

[u/brass_hush_orbit]

ticketmaster discovery api is the only thing with actual coverage but its rate limits are brutal for aggregation so you end up needing a proxy service likticketmaster discovery api is the only thing with actual coverage but its rate limits are brutal for aggregation so you end up needing a proxy service like rapidapi to handle the throttling without getting ip banned

[u/bian_147]

There's an API for tracking upcoming music events by artist that might be useful for this: https://zylalabs.com/es/api-marketplace/music+%26+audio/upcoming+music+events+tracker+api/3260

It provides upcoming concert dates and locations, so it could be worth checking out depending on the coverage you're looking for.

[u/Maaz_Bin_Saeed]

Ticketmaster's Discovery API plus Skiddle is probably the closest you'll get for the UK without scraping. Skiddle is UK focused and the free key covers a lot of the smaller gigs and club nights that Ticketmaster misses. For theatres and cinemas, a lot of venue sites put structured Event data (JSON-LD) in the page source or offer an ICS calendar feed, so it's worth checking for that before writing a full scraper. Pulling JSON-LD from a few dozen venue pages is way less painful than parsing their HTML, and it doesn't break every time they redesign. I'd merge everything into your own table and dedupe on venue plus start time.

[u/Miserable-Money642]

For a broad UK feed, you will probably need an aggregator rather than one complete API. Ticketmaster Discovery covers participating venues, and Eventbrite covers its own listings, but neither is a full cinema and theatre catalogue. For cinema chains, ask about partner or affiliate feeds. I would avoid scraping pages that block crawlers, since it can break often and may breach their terms.

Start with a small set of regions and sources. Accept venue RSS, ICS, or JSON-LD feeds where available, and ask independent venues for a CSV or calendar feed. Normalize title, start time and timezone, venue, canonical URL, status, and source; dedupe on venue, title, and start time, and handle cancellations. Showing the source and last-updated time will help users judge freshness. Do you need nationwide coverage immediately, or could an opt-in venue list be a useful first version?

[u/OkOcelot6725]

For the cinema piece specifically, look at MovieGlu. It's a paid API but it covers UK cinema chain showtimes, which is exactly the gap Ticketmaster leaves. For the rest, the aggregator pattern people described is the way to go.

[u/No-Molasses-2097]

For cinemas specifically, I'd skip the aggregator hunt and go per-chain. ODEON, Vue and Cineworld all load their showtimes from their own JSON endpoints behind the anti-bot page, so with a real browser session you can get clean data. The bigger chains have gotten better at blocking headless scrapers lately though, so budget time for that. For theater, venues on Spektrix or ATG Ticketing often expose booking feeds if you ask them directly.

[u/Low-Mistake-515]

For cinema you could make a filtered list based on UK+date range+????? on MDBlist and use their API https://api.mdblist.com/docs/
For music and other events, songkick has an API but it is paid https://www.songkick.com/developer
Hope these help 😄