How to Keep Track of Concerts You've Been To

By Alexandra P. · Published 2026-08-10 · 8 min read

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

Most people find out how many concerts they've been to by accident. You're in a pub, someone asks, and you start counting on your fingers. Twenty? Forty? You get to nine and lose the thread.

This is a method for keeping track of concerts you've been to — the one from last month and the one from 2009 you can only place by the venue. The backlog takes an afternoon. After that it's about twenty seconds a show.

Don't start with memory

Memory is the worst source you have. Starting there is why most people give up after four entries — you write down the obvious ones, hit a blank, and close the tab.

Start with the places that already hold the evidence.

Your email. Search for "your tickets", "order confirmation", "e-ticket", and the names of the ticket sellers you've used. Sort oldest first. Every confirmation hands you an artist, a venue, a city and an exact date — the four things that matter. For most people this alone recovers between forty and eighty percent of the history.

Your camera roll. Filter by year and scan for dark photos with stage lights in them. Phones store the date and usually the location. A blurry photo of a stage you can't identify still gives you a date and a city, and that's enough to work backwards from.

Your bank statements. Export a few years as CSV and search for ticket sellers and venue names. This catches every show where you deleted the email.

The drawer. Stubs, wristbands, laminates. Photograph them while you're going through them — you'll want the images attached to the entries later.

Work those four in order and put everything into one rough list. Don't tidy as you go. Tidying is a separate job and doing both at once is how the afternoon dies.

Decide what counts as a show

Settle this once, at the start, or your numbers will mean nothing later.

The question everyone trips on is festivals. You went to a festival and saw fourteen bands across three days. Is that one entry or fourteen?

Both are defensible, but they measure different things. One entry records how many times you went somewhere. Fourteen records how many bands you actually stood in front of. If you want your artist count and your most-seen band to be true, you need the fourteen.

Gigvault counts festival sets individually and keeps them filed under the festival, so the trip stays intact and the numbers stay honest. It works the same way for a weekend at Glastonbury as for three bands on a Tuesday at the Backstage in Munich.

Support slots follow the same logic. If you turned up early and watched the opener, that's a band you've seen. Log it. In five years you'll be glad you have the entry from the night the support act was someone nobody had heard of yet.

The four fields that actually matter

Artist. Venue. City. Date.

That's the minimum, and it's enough. Everything else can be added later — ratings, photos, who you were with, what went wrong. The date is the exception, because the date is the first thing that goes and the hardest to recover.

If you can't pin the exact day, put the month in and correct it when the email turns up. An approximate entry is worth far more than a missing one.

Getting the backlog in without losing a weekend

Two things make the old shows survivable.

Work by year, not by artist. Pick 2019 and finish 2019, then go to 2018. Chronological order means each entry shakes the next one loose — you'll remember the show you went to two weeks after the one you're typing. Going artist by artist gives you no such thread.

Add them in bulk rather than one at a time. If you've been going to shows for twenty years, typing three hundred entries individually is a project nobody completes. Adding your past concerts as a batch and filling in the detail afterwards is the difference between a finished history and an abandoned one.

Set a stopping point before you start. One hour, or one decade, whichever comes first. The backlog isn't going anywhere.

The ongoing habit

The habit only survives if it costs less than the effort of remembering. Three rules that hold up:

• Log on the way home. Not the next morning. On the tram, in the taxi, in the cloakroom queue. The show isn't finished until it's in.
• Don't wait for a good photo. Log first. The photo can go in whenever.
• Never leave a festival until later. Log each set on the day. By day three, your memory of day one is already unreliable.

If you want the specific steps inside Gigvault — account, first entry, Wrapped — they're on the how to use Gigvault page.

What to do with the gaps

You'll hit shows where you have a date and nothing else, or a venue and no idea who played. Log them anyway, with whatever you've got.

Two things usually close them later. The setlist: if you can work out what was played that night, you can usually identify the tour and confirm the band — the apps that keep those records are compared in apps that track live show setlists. And other people: if a friend was there, their entry has the details yours is missing.

Leave the incomplete entries in. "Someone at the Backstage, autumn 2011" is a real memory. Deleting it because it's untidy is the only way to genuinely lose it.

If you're still weighing up whether any of this is worth the effort, that argument is made separately in why log every concert.

Common questions

How far back can I realistically go?

Further than you'd think. Email confirmations usually reach back ten to fifteen years, and camera rolls cover roughly the same period. Before that you're on stubs and memory, and the entries get approximate — which is fine.

What if I can't remember the exact date?

Log the month. An approximate date is a real entry; a missing one is nothing. Correct it when the confirmation turns up.

Should a festival count as one show or as every set I saw?

Count each set if you want your artist count and most-seen band to be accurate. Count it as one if you're recording trips rather than bands. Pick one and stay with it — switching later makes the whole history meaningless.

Is it worth logging shows I only saw half of?

Yes. Twenty minutes of a band on a second stage is still a band you've seen, and those are exactly the entries you can't reconstruct later.

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