Last Monday 26th October my Girlfriend and I were at home and felt like going out and doing something fun, something a bit more than just dinner. I had a quick look on one of ticketing websites, didn’t see anything interesting, and figured that it made sense for Auckland to be all quiet on a Monday.
The next day a friend told me he’d been to a huge concert, Zara Larsson and it was a great night, packed out. I didn’t even know it was on. On a Monday!
This isn’t the first time this has happened to me either. I’ve missed out on Snoop Dog, The Eagles, Elton John and a bunch of other concerts that I just never knew were happening.
Why that happens
There isn’t one place events live in New Zealand. There’s Ticketmaster, Eventfinda, Moshtix and a whole lot of venues selling their own tickets, and each one pushes its own stuff. Nobody is looking across all of them and telling you what the BIG one is tonight, so you end up finding out the next morning when your friends post pictures on Instagram.
I was sick of finding out about the best nights the morning after.
So I had a go at fixing it
I didn’t want to spend every weekend scouring a bunch of event websites trying to find the biggest thing on. I wanted something that would just do it for me, but also not annoy me with lists of all the small events I don’t care about.
I wasn’t going to pull staff from my Halo IT tech team off real work for this, so I tried building it myself with AI. It was a good excuse to see how far these tools have come, and the answer is further than I expected.
What came out of it is pretty simple. After choosing the domain name tonight.nz and registering it on 1stDomains, I started building the code using Claude Code.
Every 30 minutes the Tonight.nz code scours every ticking and event website I can find. Ticketmaster, Eventfinda and venue listings across all 16 NZ regions, ranks everything by crowd size, demand and ticket price, and shows the single BIGGEST thing on tonight in each region, with a few others underneath. One pick per region, every night. No scrolling through hundreds of listings.
I set a couple of rules early on. The top pick isn’t for sale, it just goes to whatever’s biggest. And quiet nights are quiet, so if nothing’s on in a region, it says so rather than dressing something up.
The interesting bit
The tech turned out to be the easy part. The harder part was all the judgement calls: what counts as “biggest”, whether promoters should be able to pay their way to the top, and what you show on a night when nothing’s on. AI will build whatever you tell it to, but deciding what’s right is still on you.
If you want to have a look
The site is live at tonight.nz. You can sign up to receive an email on Thursdays with the one biggest event in your region for each night of the weekend / week ahead, or a ping at 4pm only nights you’re interested in going out, and you choose the kinds of big events you care about, like festivals, international acts, theatre and ballet, or big sport. If you’re only into big concerts or psytrance festivals, you’ll never miss another one, and you’ll only hear about the stuff you actually want to go to.
Next time you’re at home thinking nothing’s on, I’d love you to have a look at tonight.nz just in case! And if you have any thoughts about how I can improve the site, or features or bugs, just hit reply to this email and let me know :-)