Your first bullet point hits the nail on the head. Yes, this is the sad reality of many event-related sites today. There are some who avoid it by being super-ex

Your first bullet point hits the nail on the head. Yes, this is the sad reality of many event-related sites today. There are some who avoid it by being super-exclusive and private, but that's another story. I will disagree about the calendaring thing. Perhaps my friends are all overscheduled Bay Area people but we do use calendars outside of work. Furthermore, promoters and venue owners do have to use something like a calendar tool, eventually, and that is a potential gateway to grabbing good event data and republishing it. I don't know of anyone that's courting this side of the market well. Offering these people the carrot of better tools plus the even tastier carrot of automatic connections with fans, syndication, promotion, might work.