A ZINE-STYLED LISTINGS SITE FOR WELLINGTON'S FREE GIG SCENE

Wellington's live music scene already has two platforms that cover ticketed shows comprehensively — Eventfinda and UnderTheRadar. Building a third version of that would just be a worse clone of something that already works. The actual gap sits one tier down: free shows, all-ages nights, and DIY gigs at small venues, the kind of thing that has no ticket to sell and therefore no commercial reason to appear on a ticketing platform. Eyegum's long-running free Wednesday lineups and Pyramid Club's DIY nights end up scattered across Instagram stories instead — a discovery problem, not a supply problem. Paste Up is scoped specifically to that slice.

Submissions, not scraping

The obvious shortcut would be scraping Instagram and Facebook for gig posts. I ruled that out deliberately: scraping is fragile against layout changes, carries real terms-of-service risk on both platforms, and puts the accuracy burden on a script instead of on the person who actually knows whether the event is real. Paste Up runs on a submission model instead — venues, promoters, and artists submit their own listings through a form, gated behind a lightweight shared-access-code check rather than full account creation, since the initial base of contributors is small.

A moderation step that's honest about its own state

Every submission lands in an admin queue and only appears on the public listings once approved — a deliberate chokepoint to keep spam out while there are only a handful of contributors. The homepage has an explicit empty state ("Nothing on the books yet," with a direct link to submit) built for the honest case of a new deployment with no real listings yet, rather than papering over it with content dressed up to look real.

Everything runs server-side against Supabase directly — Server Components for reads, Server Actions for the submission and moderation writes — with one exception: a small /api/events REST layer, added later so ConsoleView, an Angular port of three of these screens, would have something external to call instead of reaching into Supabase itself.

Designing away from the ticketing-site look

The visual direction is the clearest design decision in the project: closer to a flyer wall or zine than a ticketing platform, reinforcing that this is the DIY tier, not a cheap Eventfinda clone. Anton for display type, Space Mono for everything functional, hard 2px borders with an offset drop shadow on every card, and a flat ink/paper/pink palette instead of the soft gradients ticketing sites default to. It's a direct application of the visual and motion instincts from the Boom Bap Bombay freelance work — for a Mumbai hip-hop label — carried into an unrelated Wellington context. The skill transfers even when the relationships don't. Venue and night pages follow the same system, so a page can be handed straight to a promoter without looking like a template with their name dropped in.

What's deliberately not in scope

No ticketing or payments — irrelevant for free shows, and anything paid just links out. No attempt to cover every free/DIY night in Wellington from day one; the plan is to start with a handful of venues and expand only as fast as real submissions justify. And no pretending this competes with Eventfinda or UnderTheRadar — if anything, the eventual pitch to them is as a complementary niche tool, not a rival.

Where it actually stands

The listings feed, submission form, moderation queue, and venue pages all work end to end — this is a real, running app, not a mockup, live at app-flame-eight-29.vercel.app. What hasn't happened yet is the cold outreach: no existing relationships with Wellington venues or promoters to lean on going in, so the actual test — whether Eyegum, Pyramid Club, or a similar night will submit real listings — starts from zero, on the strength of the tool itself.