How to keep track of the gigs and concerts you've been to
Keep a simple concert diary. Write each gig down within a day of going: the artist, the support, the venue, the date, who you went with and one moment you want to keep. Then hang on to the ticket. For concerts from years ago, your inbox, bank statements and camera roll can rebuild most of the list.
Why bother keeping a list?
Gigs blur faster than almost anything else. You remember the feeling and a song or two, but within a few years the year, the venue and even the support act start to slip. A list pins down the facts so the memories have something to hang on.
It's also just good to have. The first gig you went to on your own. How many times you've seen the same band. The small venue that has since closed. None of that is in your streaming history.
What should you write down for each gig?
- The date, and the city if you travel for gigs.
- The headliner and the support acts.
- The venue.
- Who you went with.
- One moment: the opener, the encore, the song you didn't expect.
- A rating, if you like rating things.
The support act is the one people forget to note and most regret later. Plenty of bands you love now were once the support act you half watched from the bar.
How do you find concerts you went to years ago?
If you're starting a list now, you probably have years of gigs to recover. Most of them left a trace somewhere.
Search your email. Try "your tickets", "order confirmation" and the names of the ticket sellers you've used. Confirmation emails usually have the artist, venue and date in one place.
Check your bank statements. Ticket purchases show up under the seller's name. They're often dated weeks or months before the gig itself, so treat them as a lead rather than the date.
Scroll your camera roll. Phones store the date of every photo, and many group them by place. Blurry stage photos are finally useful.
Look up setlists. Setlist.fm has setlists for a huge number of concerts, searchable by artist, venue and date. Once you know roughly when you went, it can confirm the exact night and remind you what was played. You can mark the shows you went to there, too.
Ask the people you went with. Someone always remembers the date. Someone else remembers the support act.
What about festivals?
A festival is a lot of gigs in a weekend, and the sets run together fast. You have two options. Log the festival as one entry, with the sets you saw listed in your line. Or log each set you cared about as its own gig, with the day and the stage. The second takes longer but keeps the bands you discovered from getting lost in the crowd.
Either way, write it down before the drive home. By Tuesday you won't remember which day the rain came.
How do you make it a habit?
Put upcoming gigs in your calendar as soon as you buy the tickets, with the venue and the support if it's announced. On the day after, that calendar entry is your reminder to log it, and half the details are already there.
What do you do with old ticket stubs?
Keep them. Paper tickets fade, especially the thermal kind, so store them somewhere dark, like a shoebox. To be safe, photograph them when you get home.
Digital tickets are easier to lose. They live in an app or an email, and they can be hard to find once the night is over. A screenshot on the day costs nothing and gives you a stub of sorts.
Should gigs live with the rest of your log?
A gig rarely stands alone. You go because of an album, and you come home and play that album for a month (the albums guide covers logging those). If your music, films and books are logged in one place and your gigs in another, you lose that thread.
artsvibe treats gigs as their own type, next to films, series, albums and books. You log a gig the same way as anything else, with a rating, a line and the date, and it sits in your diary on the night it happened. On your shelf, gigs show up as tickets. The FAQ has more on how it works.
Whatever you use, write it down the next day, and don't forget the support act.