Concert Tracker vs Spreadsheet: Which Should You Use?

By Alexandra P. · Published 2026-09-05 · 7 min read

Founder of Gigvault — the concert tracker for live music fans.

Most people who take live music seriously have tried this. A spreadsheet with four columns — date, band, venue, city — started with real enthusiasm somewhere around show number thirty, when it became obvious that memory alone was not going to hold it.

Some of those spreadsheets are magnificent. Colour-coded by year, conditional formatting on festival rows, a pivot table nobody else could operate.

This is an honest look at where that approach genuinely wins, and where it quietly stops working. Written by people who build a concert tracker, so read the last section first if you like — it says who should stay on the spreadsheet.

What a spreadsheet genuinely does better

Let us not pretend otherwise. A spreadsheet beats an app on four real points:

It is completely yours. No account, no company, no terms of service. The file sits on your disk and it will still open in twenty years. No app can promise that with a straight face.

It costs nothing and never will. No tier, no upgrade prompt, no feature that moves behind a paywall next spring.

It bends to you. Want a column for who you went with, what you paid, whether the support act was better, how far you travelled? Add it. No app will ever have exactly your columns.

It is private by construction. Nobody sees it. No profile, no feed, no "your friend logged a gig."

If those four things are what you care about most, the honest answer is that you already have the right tool. Everything below is about a different set of priorities.

Where it starts costing you

The spreadsheet does not fail dramatically. It just gets slowly more expensive to maintain, in three specific places.

Every detail is typing. The setlist is the clearest case. If you want to know what they played, someone has to find it and enter it — twenty-odd songs, per show. Almost nobody does this twice. So the column exists, gets filled in for four concerts, and stays empty for the next sixty.

Questions cost work. "How many shows this year?" is a formula. "Which venue do I go to most?" is a pivot table. "How many hours of live music was that?" needs a duration column you never filled in. Each answer is a small project, so most of them never get asked.

The backlog stays a backlog. Shows from before the spreadsheet existed need archaeology — ticket stubs, old photos, messages. In a blank grid there is nothing to help you. No suggestions, no "did you mean this date at this venue," nothing.

And then there is the failure mode everyone recognises: a busy autumn, four shows in three weeks, and the file does not get opened. By the time you come back you are guessing at dates. A row you never typed is a show that effectively did not happen.

What a tracker adds — and what it takes

The trade is straightforward. You give up total control over the file. In return, the typing mostly stops.

That last row is the one worth being suspicious about, and it is where most comparisons go quiet.

The question to ask any tracker

Not "what features does it have?" but "can I get everything back out?"

A spreadsheet answers that by existing. An app has to answer it deliberately — and plenty do not. A concert history you cannot export is a concert history you are renting.

For what it is worth, Gigvault exports the lot as CSV or JSON: date, artist, support acts, venue, city, ratings and notes. No export fee, no locked tier. That is the honest version of the answer, and you should demand it from any tracker you try — including this one.

Ask it before you type in two hundred shows, not after.

Moving a spreadsheet across without losing a weekend

If you do decide to try it, the usual mistake is treating it as a migration project. It is not.

Start with the ones you would name out loud. The twenty shows you would list if someone asked what you have seen. Those carry most of the meaning and take an evening.

Let the setlists arrive on their own. This is the part that pays for the move. Enter a show from 2014 and the songs attach themselves — the column your spreadsheet never had, filled in retroactively.

Leave the file where it is. Nothing forces you to delete it. Keep it as your backup until you are convinced, and export back out if you are not.

Add the rest one show at a time. The backlog fills itself in over a few months without ever becoming a chore.

So which one?

Stay with the spreadsheet if the control is the point. If you have columns nobody else would think of, if you like the pivot tables, if the idea of your concert history living in someone else's database bothers you on principle — that is a legitimate position and no feature list should talk you out of it.

Try a tracker if the honest state of your spreadsheet is "last updated fourteen months ago." Or if the setlist column is empty. Or if you have ever wanted to know how many shows you have actually seen and given up before the formula worked.

Keep both if you want the belt and braces: track in the app, export to CSV once a year, keep the file.

The spreadsheet is not the wrong answer. It is the answer that costs you a little more every year, and most people stop paying without deciding to.

Start your concert diary — free, unlimited shows, and a working export button.

Related: How to keep track of concerts you've been to · Export your concert history · The 5 best apps to track concerts

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