Recognising events schema

Question

Our website has been recognised for rich markup for a number of years, and a few months ago we added the Schema.org markup for events to our pages.

Google Webmaster console is recogising that this is on the pages, ans showing 1000s of pages with correct markup, no errors.

However, we've not yet made it into Google's event overviews at the top of searches such as 'manchester events'

This is a shame as some of our affiliates are listed there using our data, albeit slightly out of date or not as rich. It would be preferential for Google to be using the data direct from the primary source surely?

Is there a whitelist in operation or or are we implementing wrong? We have the markup against individual events, do we need it on our overview pages too which list multiple events on one page?

Example:

Google results: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=manchester+events

Example markup:

<script type="application/ld+json">[

    {
        "@context" : "http://schema.org",
        "@type" : "MusicEvent",
        "name" : "His Clancyness + support",
        "image" : "https://d31fr2pwly4c4s.cloudfront.net/7/0/2/887119_0_his-clancyness-support_1024.jpg",
        "url" : "https://www.domain.com/.../.../",
        "startDate" : "2016-10-07T19:30:00+01:00",
        "endDate" : "2016-10-07T23:00:00+01:00",
        "doorTime" : "2016-10-07T19:30:00+01:00",
        "description" : "His Clancyness + support",


        "typicalAgeRange" : "18+",
        "location" :
        {
            "@type" : "Place",
            "name" : "The Shipping Forecast",

            "address" :
            {
                "@type" : "PostalAddress",
                "streetAddress" : "15 Slater St",
                "addressLocality" : "Liverpool",

                "postalCode" : "L1 4BW",
                "addressCountry" : "GB"
            }
        }

        ,"offers" :
        [{
            "@type" : "Offer",
            "name" : "Advance Discount Ticket",
            "category" : "primary",
            "url" : "https://www.domain.com/.../.../",
            "price" : "8.00",
            "pricecurrency" : "GBP",
            "validFrom" : "2016-08-11 13:27:53",
            "validThrough" : "2016-10-07 18:30:00",
            "availability": "http://schema.org/InStock"
        },{
            "@type" : "Offer",
            "name" : "Advance Ticket",
            "category" : "primary",
            "url" : "https://www.domain.com/.../.../",
            "price" : "8.00",
            "pricecurrency" : "GBP",
            "validFrom" : "2016-08-11 18:00:00",
            "validThrough" : "2016-10-07 18:30:00",
            "availability": "http://schema.org/InStock"
        }]
        }]</script>

Answer 1

The webmaster tools' rich snippets can be alluring but frustrating huh?!

Putting your snippet into https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/ it recommends adding "performer" as a warning, this could help bump you up.

However it has to be noted at the time of writing MusicEvent is not yet a qualifying content type: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-content#content_types but I must admit I think that is mighty confusing as the data type selector page doesn't mention that the types might not be active yet: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/data-type-selector unless of course the bar at the top for searching "manchester events" is infact using a non-schema.org data source.

I'd try adding performer and see how far it gets you.