About

Why this directory exists, and how every listing gets checked before it goes up.

What's On Jakarta is a directory of events in Jakarta and the surrounding area that have a confirmed date, a confirmed venue, and somewhere real to get tickets.

That sounds like a low bar. It isn't. A great many Jakarta event listings you will find online are for events that finished months ago, or give a day and month with no year, or point at a venue the organiser has since changed. We started this because checking those things every time was tedious, and because nobody should have to cross-reference four sites to find out whether a festival is actually happening.

How we check things

Every listing here has been verified against the organiser before it goes up. Where sources disagree — and they disagree more often than you would expect — we go with the organiser's own channels and their ticket seller, not with aggregators.

A few rules we hold to:

The year has to be stated. A page advertising "3–6 October" with no year is not evidence of anything. Several Jakarta event sites have sat frozen on an old edition for years while looking entirely current.
Venue calendars are not gospel. They record hall bookings, which include build-up days and provisional holds, and they go stale. Where a venue and an organiser disagree, we say so in the listing rather than quietly picking one.
Ticket links go to the official seller. Never a resale platform. If tickets are not on sale yet, we say that plainly and leave the button inactive rather than sending you to a holding page.
Nothing that has already happened. Past events are removed, not left to clutter the list.

Where something is genuinely uncertain, the listing says so. You will find notes on a couple of entries flagging a date or venue conflict we could not resolve. We would rather tell you than guess.

What you'll find here

Concerts and festivals, art fairs and exhibitions, markets and bazaars, sport, workshops, community gatherings and business events — across the five Jakarta municipalities and Greater Jakarta, including the big exhibition venues out at BSD and Kemayoran.

Coverage is honest rather than complete. Some categories are thin, and that is usually because the events genuinely aren't there in a dated, bookable form. Jakarta's food and nightlife scenes, for instance, run largely on recurring promotions rather than one-off ticketed events, so those sections fill slowly. We would rather show you an empty category than pad it.

Adding your event

Submissions are welcome and free. The more of the following you can give us, the faster it goes up: exact dates including the year, start and finish times, the full venue name and address, a direct link to the official ticket page, and a landscape image you have the rights to use.

We check every submission before publishing, so please point us at your own website or Instagram rather than a third-party listing.