Setlists Are Now Part of Your Concert Diary
By Alexandra P. · Published 2026-08-15 · 5 min read
Founder of Gigvault — the concert tracker for live music fans.
Two weeks after a concert you'll remember maybe eight of the twenty-two songs. Two years later you'll remember three, and one of them will be from a different night.
The setlist is the fastest-fading part of a show. It's also the part people argue about most. So it's now built into Gigvault: find what was played at a show you went to, and keep it attached to the entry.
The problem it solves
You already do this, just badly.
Someone brings up a gig from four years ago. You want to know whether they really opened with that one. So you open three tabs, piece it together from a tour listing, settle the argument — and then close the tabs. Six months later, same argument, same twenty minutes.
The looking-up wasn't the problem. The not-keeping-it was.
What it does
Search for the show you went to and pull up what was played that night. Save it to your entry, where it sits alongside the date, the venue, your rating, your photos and the one line you wrote on the way home.
From then on it's part of your history rather than something you have to find again. Your entry for that night is complete instead of approximate.
It works the same way for old shows. If you're entering a backlog, the setlist is often what confirms which tour you were on — and sometimes which night you were actually at, when you had two candidates and no ticket. An artist page like Opeth shows the same record from the other side: every show we have, in order.
Full detail is on the setlist tracker page.
Why we built it into the diary rather than as a lookup
There are places to look up setlists. There was nowhere to keep them.
That distinction is the whole point. A setlist you looked at once is trivia. A setlist filed against a date, a venue and a band becomes part of a record — and once you have a few hundred of them, it starts answering questions no single lookup can. Which songs you've heard live most often. The one they played on the night you were there and dropped from the tour a week later. The encore that only happened twice.
None of that exists if the setlist lives in a closed tab.
What it means for festivals
Festival sets are the hardest to reconstruct and the first to disappear. They're cut down from the tour set, they're forty minutes instead of ninety, and you were probably moving between stages.
Because Gigvault counts each festival set as its own entry, each one can carry its own setlist. Eight sets across a weekend is eight records, not one line that says the festival's name and nothing else.
If the setlist doesn't exist
Some shows have no record. Small venues, early tours, support slots in a room with two hundred people in it. There is genuinely nothing to find, and no app changes that.
Log the show anyway and put in the three songs you're sure of. Three songs and one sentence beats a perfect setlist you never wrote down.
Try it on a show you're unsure about
Not the obvious one. Pick a gig from years ago where you can't remember the encore, and see whether the record fills the gap.
That's the case this was built for. If you're new to Gigvault, how it works takes about two minutes.
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About the author
Alexandra P. built Gigvault solo after years of going to concerts and never finding an app that actually captured what happens at shows. No investors, no ads, no data sold. Read the founder story →