Export Events from The Events Calendar to Bandsintown

If your band or venue manages gigs in The Events Calendar on WordPress and also wants them on Bandsintown, you have two jobs: get the existing events into your Bandsintown for Artists account, and then decide which system is the source of truth going forward. There is no button in either plugin that pushes events from one to the other, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling a workflow that does not exist. What does work is exporting from The Events Calendar, bulk-uploading into Bandsintown, and then letting the free Bandsintown Events plugin display the synced list on your site.

We have set this up for a handful of music sites, usually after a promoter got tired of entering every date twice. Below is the full process, the gotchas in each export format, and the point where we usually recommend flipping the direction of the sync.

What each tool actually does

The Events Calendar (free, by The Events Calendar / Liquid Web) stores events as a custom post type on your own site. You own the data, it has its own URLs, and it feeds your site’s calendar views, search and structured data.

Bandsintown is a separate platform. Events live on Bandsintown’s servers, attached to an artist or venue page, and that is where fans with the Bandsintown app get notified and where tickets are linked. The Bandsintown Events plugin (version 1.4.x, 4,000+ active installs) does not import anything into WordPress. It renders a live widget from the Bandsintown API using your artist name or ID plus an app_id generated in your Bandsintown for Artists account. Edit an event on Bandsintown and the widget updates; edit an event in The Events Calendar and Bandsintown never hears about it.

So “export from The Events Calendar to Bandsintown” means: get your events out of WordPress in a structured format, then get them into Bandsintown through the tools Bandsintown provides. Those tools are a manual Add Event form and a spreadsheet bulk upload.

Before you start: the three things Bandsintown needs

Bandsintown rejects events that are missing any of these, so collect them before exporting.

1. A claimed artist or venue page. Sign in at artist.bandsintown.com (or the venues dashboard for venues) and claim the page. Events added to an unclaimed or misspelled artist name either fail or end up on someone else’s page.
2. Dates in ISO format with a timezone. Bandsintown’s bulk template wants YYYY-MM-DD dates, 24-hour times and a timezone written as Country/City_Name (for example Europe/Berlin). The Events Calendar stores both local and UTC times, so you have what you need, but the export will not be in this shape by default.
3. A ticket link per event. Bandsintown lets you attach one or more ticket URLs, each labelled Tickets, Presale, VIP, Free or Sold Out. If you attach more than one, at least one must be labelled Tickets. Events without a ticket link still publish, but they lose the “Tickets” button that is the whole reason fans follow artists there.

Step 1: export events from The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar gives you three ways to get events out, and only one of them is useful for this job.

iCal and Google Calendar feeds (not what you want)

Every calendar view has a Subscribe to calendar button that offers Google Calendar, iCalendar and an ICS file export. Appending ?ical=1 to any events URL (for example https://example.com/events/?ical=1) downloads the same ICS file. It is a proper iCalendar file with summary, dates, location and description, but it contains no ticket URLs as a separate field and Bandsintown has no ICS importer. Keep it for fans and for syncing to Google Calendar; it is a dead end for Bandsintown.

CSV export (the one to use)

The free plugin ships a CSV importer (Events → Import) but no CSV exporter. You need one of these:

• WP All Export (free version is enough). Create a new export, choose the Events post type, drag in title, start date, start time, end date, end time, venue name, venue city, venue country, the event website URL and the cost field. The Events Calendar stores the key fields as post meta: _EventStartDate, _EventEndDate, _EventTimezone, _EventURL, _EventCost, and _EventVenueID for the linked venue.
• WP-CLI, if you are comfortable on the command line. A single query pulls the fields straight into a CSV:

wp post list --post_type=tribe_events --post_status=publish \
  --fields=ID,post_title \
  --meta_key=_EventStartDate --orderby=meta_value --order=ASC --format=csv > events.csv

# then per event, pull the meta you need
wp post meta get 123 _EventStartDate
wp post meta get 123 _EventTimezone
wp post meta get 123 _EventURL

Either route gives you a spreadsheet you can reshape. Filter it to future events only; Bandsintown does not want your 2019 gigs.

Step 2: reshape the spreadsheet for Bandsintown

Download Bandsintown’s bulk upload template from the dashboard (Events → Upload, then the link in box 1). The template changes occasionally, so always start from the current file rather than a saved copy. As of this writing it accepts up to 50 events per file, one row per event, with these columns mattering most:

Bandsintown column	The Events Calendar source	Notes
Headliner / artist name	Your artist name (constant)	Must match the claimed Bandsintown page exactly
Event date	_EventStartDate (first 10 chars)	Format YYYY-MM-DD
Start time	_EventStartDate (time part)	24-hour, HH:MM
Timezone	_EventTimezone	Already in Region/City form if the event was saved with a zone
Venue name, city, country	Linked venue post	Bandsintown matches against its venue database; spelling matters
Ticket URL and type	_EventURL or your ticketing link	Label one link “Tickets”
Event name (optional)	post_title	Leave blank for plain gigs; use it for festivals or residencies
Description (optional)	Post content, stripped of HTML	Keep it short; the widget truncates

Two cleanup tasks catch nearly every upload failure we have seen. First, The Events Calendar stores dates as 2026-09-14 20:00:00 in one cell; split it into date and time columns with a formula such as =LEFT(A2,10) and =MID(A2,12,5). Second, venues entered casually in WordPress (“The Garage, London” in one field) need to be split into name, city and country so Bandsintown can match them.

Step 3: upload and publish on Bandsintown

1. In Bandsintown for Artists, open Events and click Upload (venues see the same flow in the Venues dashboard).
2. Choose your filled-in template. Bandsintown validates each row and reports errors per line; fix those rows in the sheet and re-upload only the failures.
3. Review the imported events. Each one can be published immediately, scheduled to publish at a later date and time, or held as a draft. If a tour announcement is embargoed, use scheduling rather than uploading on the day.
4. Open two or three events and confirm the ticket button, venue map and time look right. A wrong timezone shows up here as an event at 3am.

Bandsintown also accepts single events through the Add Event form, with fields for start and end time, event name, description, poster, lineup, setlist, ticket links with on-sale dates and a live stream link. For under ten events, the form is faster than fighting the spreadsheet.

Step 4: show the Bandsintown list on your WordPress site

Once the events are on Bandsintown, install the Bandsintown Events plugin from Plugins → Add New. Under its settings enter your artist name (or id_ followed by your numeric artist ID, which avoids name clashes) and the app_id from your Bandsintown for Artists account. Then drop the Bandsintown Events block onto a page, or use the shortcode where blocks are not available. The widget handles the ticket buttons, “Notify me” follow prompts and six interface languages.

You now have the same events in two places. Which one do you keep editing?

Pick a source of truth

This is the decision that saves the most time, and most sites get it wrong by trying to maintain both.

Approach	Good for	Downside
Bandsintown as source, widget on site	Touring artists whose fans live in the Bandsintown app	No event pages on your own domain, weaker SEO, no control over markup
The Events Calendar as source, periodic CSV push to Bandsintown	Venues and festivals with rich event pages, multiple artists, own ticketing	Manual re-export whenever dates change; easy to drift
Both, entered by hand	Nobody	Doubles the work and guarantees mismatches

Our rule: if you are a single artist and your site is mostly a landing page, let Bandsintown own the dates and embed the widget. If you run a venue, a festival or a multi-artist community where the event page itself carries content (line-ups, galleries, reviews, member RSVPs), keep The Events Calendar (or a WordPress-native alternative such as Eventonomy) as the master and treat Bandsintown as a distribution channel you update in batches, say every time a new run of dates is announced.

Automating the push (with caveats)

Bandsintown’s public API is read-only for event data; it lets you fetch an artist’s events, not create them. That is why there is no plugin that syncs outward. The realistic automation options are:

• Scheduled export. WP All Export Pro can regenerate the CSV on a cron schedule and drop it in a folder or email it, so the sheet is always ready to upload.
• Reverse the flow. If Bandsintown becomes the master, a short custom plugin can pull the Bandsintown API feed and create or update The Events Calendar posts through tribe_create_event() / tribe_update_event(), giving you native event pages that track Bandsintown. This is a day or two of development and is the route we take when a client needs both the app reach and proper on-site pages. Our custom plugin development team has built variants of this for event sites.
• Zapier or Make. Both have Bandsintown triggers (new event on Bandsintown) but no “create event” action, which confirms the direction: Bandsintown out, not Bandsintown in.

Troubleshooting

Upload rejected: invalid date or time

Almost always the cell still contains the combined datetime string, or Excel has reformatted the date to 14/09/2026. Set the column format to text before pasting and keep YYYY-MM-DD.

Venue not recognised

Search the venue on bandsintown.com first and copy its exact name and city. If it genuinely does not exist, Bandsintown creates it, but a near-miss spelling creates a duplicate venue that splits your event history.

Events show on Bandsintown but not in the WordPress widget

Check the artist name or ID in the plugin settings, confirm the app_id is the one tied to that artist, and clear your page cache. The plugin fetches live, but a caching plugin can hold the empty first render for hours.

Times are off by several hours

The timezone column was blank or the events in WordPress were saved under the site timezone rather than the venue’s. Fix the timezone in the sheet; do not shift the times to compensate.

Frequently asked questions

Can the Bandsintown plugin import events into The Events Calendar?

No. It displays a widget from the Bandsintown API. To get Bandsintown events into The Events Calendar you need custom code or a manual entry.

Does The Events Calendar Pro change any of this?

Pro adds recurring events, additional views and the Event Aggregator importer for CSV, ICS, Google Calendar and Meetup. Aggregator still imports into WordPress, not out to Bandsintown, so the export side is unchanged.

How often should I re-sync?

Whenever dates are announced, moved or cancelled. A cancelled show left live on Bandsintown generates more angry messages than a missing one, so make cancellations the first thing you mirror.

Is there a cost?

The Events Calendar, the Bandsintown Events plugin and a Bandsintown for Artists account are all free. WP All Export has a free tier that covers this export. Bandsintown’s paid tiers add features such as manual approval of imported events, which matter mostly to venues.

Where to start

Claim your Bandsintown page, export your upcoming events to CSV with WP All Export, reshape the sheet to the current Bandsintown template, and upload in batches of 50. Then embed the Bandsintown widget and decide, today, which system you will edit from now on. If that answer is WordPress, put a recurring reminder in the calendar to push changes, or talk to a developer about pulling Bandsintown into The Events Calendar so the decision stops mattering.