Record

Check the CAST Record — a curated index of entertainment-technology companies (venues, live events, touring, broadcast, music tech) — for companies matching a challenge, need or capability. Use whenever someone says 'check Record', 'check the Record', 'ask Record', or wants entertainment/venue tech vendors. Present the answer under the heading 'Record results', and link each company to its record_url so the reader can open the full profile. quick returns ranked matches in ~1-2s; researched adds a synthesised answer and per-company reasoning but takes 10-25s. If the person has shared a strategic plan, board paper, tender or brief with you, pass it: either as org_context, or by including the relevant part in the question itself. Record then ranks for fit against it and returns `brief` — the plan assessed against where the field is moving, priority by priority, with the companies last — and brief_read, the working behind it.

check_record

What comparable buyers ACTUALLY PAID, from published public-sector award notices. Use it whenever price, budget or value for money comes up — 'what should we budget for access control', 'is 40k reasonable for a ticketing platform', 'what do venues pay for this'. Record declines to make a pricing judgement and that does not change; this hands over the evidence underneath it instead. Present the MEDIAN and the range, never a mean — procurement values are wildly skewed and one framework covering forty authorities sits in the same set as a single venue's purchase. Quote every figure with its buyer, date and notice link, and say plainly that scope differs between notices (licences alone versus licences plus five years of support), so this is a range to reason from and not a price for the reader's own situation. Fast (~1s).

comparable_awards

Fetch the full CAST Record profile for one company by its Record slug (as returned by check_record). Fast (~1s).

get_company

Coverage and freshness statistics for the CAST Record index (recent changes, update cadence). No input. Fast (~1s).

index_stats

Check whether a specific company is already in the CAST Record index, by website domain (preferred) or name. Use this for 'is X on Record?' questions rather than searching. Fast (~1s).

lookup_company

COUNTS, not a search. Use this — never check_record — whenever the question is about the shape of the field rather than about which companies to shortlist: where the opportunity is, what is underbuilt, which categories are growing or converging, what is being built in one region versus another, which problems have the most companies chasing them, what people are asking for and not finding. check_record answers those with a similarity search, which cannot count and will present ten retrieved rows as a finding about the industry. This returns arithmetic over the whole index instead: companies by category, coverage growth, stated region with the unstated count beside it, founding years, which PROBLEM DOMAINS the reporting is concentrating in (`news.problems` — the axis that aggregates, and the one to read for where the field is under pressure; `news.themes` is per-story prose and is filtered to labels carried by more than one reading, so it is often short), what it connects, and — the one measure of DEMAND rather than supply — the needs that reached Record and found nothing. Every figure carries its window and its population. Read the `reading` field before quoting any of them, and follow it. Takes 3-6s.

market_landscape

The REVERSE lookup, and not a search. Use it when the reader already has a system they cannot replace, or names an organisation and wants to know who serves it: 'what works alongside Tessitura', 'which vendors integrate with Spektrix', 'which suppliers name the OVO Hydro as a customer'. check_record cannot answer these — it finds companies that DO a thing, not companies that NAME a thing. Both lists here come from names each company published on its own integrations or customers page, matched exactly. Absence is never a denial: say a company 'does not name it' rather than 'does not support it', because many publish no list at all. `names_as_customer` is a published logo and never private intelligence about what an organisation runs. Fast (~1s).

works_with