How the Atlas works
The Atlas is every room in the United States with a stage, on one map, for the artists who play them. It starts from open data and fills with proof: shows the Credits Ledger confirms, dates coming up, and reviews from the people who played the room.
Where the rooms come from
60,714 rooms, from Overture Maps (release 2026-09-23.1), which brings together listings from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare, AllThePlaces and others. We kept the rooms with a stage, folded two listings of the same room into one by plain rules anybody can read, and left out what is not a room you can play: schools, sports fields, shops and offices.
Capacities, opening years and other names come from Wikidata, and photos from Wikimedia Commons, each credited on its room's page with its author and licence.
The areas are whole counties, grouped the way the U.S. Census Bureau groups them into metro and micro areas; a county in neither is an area of its own. The boundaries are the Census Bureau's, and the roads are OpenStreetMap's.
Bars, and listings too thin to trust, are kept off the map. A bar with a stage appears once its venue claims it, says so, and ARIA approves the claim. This copy of the data was built on October 12, 2026.
What the marks mean
- Every kind of room has its own colour, on its pin, its row and its page: Music venue Theater Club Event space Arena or stadium Amphitheater Festival ground Bar
- Verified by the venue The room's own people proved it is theirs, and ARIA checked the proof.
- On the Credits Ledger3 confirmed shows The room is on the Credits Ledger, and these are the shows there it confirms: somebody entered the show, and somebody else who was there confirmed it.
- A date coming up, added by ARIA, by the venue, or by the artist playing it. No event feeds from ticket sites, ever.
- ★ Featured, paid A claimed venue paying to be listed first in its area. That is all it buys: see below.
- Every fact on a room's page says where it came from: from a public database, from the venue, or set by ARIA. What the venue or ARIA typed beats what a database said.
Reviews
- Any ARIA account can review a room: one review an account a room, and writing again replaces it. Five a day at most.
- A venue cannot review its own room, and nor can anybody with a claim on it.
- A review is a rating from one to five, what was true from a short list of good things (Paid what was agreed, Paid on time, Sound was good, Engineer was helpful, Backline as described, Promoted the show, Treated us well, Fed the band, Would play again), what the deal was, and what happened in the writer's own words. There are no bad tags: the rating carries a bad night.
- The deal (a guarantee, a door split, a share of the bar, played for free, paid to play, a presale minimum, something else) is shown as what one artist was paid for one show, never as the room's policy.
- A writer with a tie to the room beyond playing it, like working or booking there, says so, and it is shown with the review.
- Where the Credits Ledger confirms the writer played the room, the review carries a mark that says so.
- The venue may reply once to each review, in public, under it. It may also mark a review it disputes: the review then says “The venue disputes this” and stays up. A dispute never changes the rating.
- Nothing is given for writing a review, and nothing is taken away for writing a bad one.
ARIA takes a review down only for one of these reasons, and never for being negative:
- Personal information or a likeness of somebody else
- Threats or harassment
- Obscene
- Discriminatory
- Not about playing this room
- Reasonably believed to be fake
- A court order
- Copyright notice
Every take-down is written down with its reason. We remove a review; we never edit a word of it. Anybody can report one with the Report button under it.
Reviews are not open yet.
Claiming a room
Is it your venue? Claim it from its page, with an ARIA account, in one of three ways: put a short code on the venue's own website or its social page; sign in with an email address at the venue's own domain (never a free email address, nor one at a website builder or a university many people share); or take our call on the venue's public phone number and enter the code we read out. ARIA looks at every claim before it counts.
A claimed room carries “Verified by the venue”. Its people can correct its facts, add a photo they host, add their dates, and reply once to each review. They cannot remove, hide or change a review.
Claims are not open yet.
The featured star
A claimed venue can pay to be listed first in its area, marked “Featured, paid”, with a star on its pin. Inside the featured group the order is half what each pays and half its rating. Paying more moves a venue up; it is not an auction, and nobody is pushed out of a spot by a higher offer. A full area keeps a waiting list, served in order.
What the star never does:
- It never touches a review, a rating or a count.
- It never buys “Verified by the venue” or a confirmed show.
- It never moves a room to another area, or puts its dates ahead of anybody else's.
- It never appears without the words “Featured, paid”.
- It is never sold to a room nobody has claimed.
The featured spots are not on sale yet.
Tickets
ARIA sells tickets to its own shows, and to dates at Atlas venues and 3M events whose organizers choose to sell through ARIA, each sale approved by ARIA first. Checkout is on Stripe, buyers pay the price on the ticket, and every ticket is a code in your ARIA account, let in once at the door.
Ticket sales are not open yet.
Corrections, take-downs and copyright
Something wrong about a room, or a review you believe breaks the rules above: write to us from the contact page, name the room, and say what is wrong. A venue that has claimed its page can fix most of its facts itself.
A photo of yours, or anything else here you believe copies your work: send a copyright notice to our Copyright Agent, ARIA Records LLC, 533 N. Nova Rd #113, Ormond Beach, FL 32174, (386) 331-8421, ariarecordsofficial@gmail.com. What a notice needs, and how a counter notice works, are on our terms page.
Licences
Venue listings include data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), combining contributions from Meta, Microsoft and other providers under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 license, Foursquare under the Apache License 2.0, and AllThePlaces under CC0 1.0. The licence texts and the Foursquare NOTICE are on the data licences page.
Capacities, opening years and other facts from Wikidata (CC0). Each fact on a room's page says where it came from.
State and county boundaries from the U.S. Census Bureau (public domain). Drawn with d3-geo, d3-array and topojson-client (ISC).
Roads © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License.
Photos are credited one by one with their author and licence. They come from Wikimedia Commons, or from the venue itself.
Reviews are written here, by ARIA accounts, under the rules above. We never copy a review from anywhere else.