Letterboxd for concerts: how to start a gig diary in 2026

The reason Letterboxd worked is simple: watching a film is a solitary act, but talking about it is one of the great social pleasures. Letterboxd made the talking part frictionless — and turned what used to be a private hobby into a shareable, sortable, year-in-reviewable diary.

Going to a gig is the same shape of activity. You go in a small group, or alone. The experience is intense and personal. And the next morning everyone wants to talk about it — but until recently there was nowhere obvious to do that, beyond Instagram stories that disappeared in 24 hours.

Banded is the Letterboxd-shaped answer for live music: log every show, rate it out of 5, write a review if you want, and follow other people whose taste you respect. This piece is about why that format makes sense for gigs, and how to actually get going.

What “Letterboxd for X” usually means

The Letterboxd formula breaks down into about five ingredients:

1. A personal log of everything you’ve consumed
2. A rating system — typically out of 5 stars in half-star increments
3. Reviews that are optional, free-form, and have personality
4. Lists — both editorial and personal
5. A social graph so you can follow friends and discover taste

Banded copies that template more or less directly, with two key differences:

• Instead of films, the unit is a gig — one artist, on one date, at one venue. Festivals get a different treatment because they’re not one act, they’re 30.
• Instead of one rating, you get two: artist and venue, each out of 5 in half-star increments. Venues matter for gigs in a way they don’t for films. The Lexington was a great gig; the Apollo was a better one even though the band was less good.

Why a dedicated gig diary beats “I’ll just use Notes”

Lots of people do already keep a gig diary — but in an iPhone Notes file, or a battered spreadsheet, or a private Discord channel with their friends. That works, but you lose three things:

Metadata. When you log “Beach House at Roundhouse, May 2024,” Banded automatically pulls the artist’s image, biography, and discography from MusicBrainz and Apple Music. The venue gets a map pin. The date gets contextualised against the rest of your year. None of that happens in Notes.

Stats. At the end of the year, Banded gives you a year-in-review: most-seen artist, most-visited venue, total gigs, your highest-rated show. Some people will live for this. (See How to see your most-seen artists.)

Other people. This is the big one. A diary in a notebook is private by design; a diary on Banded is public by default but can be set to friends-only or private per entry. Friends start seeing your shows in their feed, and you see theirs — which makes you aware of bands you’d otherwise have missed.

What kinds of people use Banded

Three rough archetypes emerge:

• The completist — has been going to four-plus gigs a month for fifteen years, wants a system of record. Often the person who back-dates a thousand shows in their first month.
• The casual logger — six gigs a year, mostly to friends’ bands or stadium shows. Uses Banded the way someone might log films at the cinema rather than every film at home.
• The festival person — goes to two or three festivals a year, sees twenty acts at each. Banded handles festivals as a parent record with associated acts, so you don’t have to log thirty individual shows.

If you’re in any of these camps, the format clicks pretty fast.

How Banded compares to the other usual suspects

For a fuller breakdown of who’s competing for this space, see The best apps to track concerts in 2026. The very short version:

• Setlist.fm — fantastic for setlists, awkward as a diary. UI shows its age. Owned by Live Nation. (Full comparison.)
• Songkick — built around upcoming gigs, not past ones. Its tracking features have been wound down repeatedly. (Songkick alternatives.)
• Bandsintown — discovery-first, more of a Ticketmaster competitor than a Letterboxd one. (Banded vs Bandsintown.)
• Concertful — niche aggregator, web-only.

None of these were designed primarily as a diary, which is why Banded exists.

Starting your own gig diary

The first thing to do, the moment you open the app, is back-date. Sit down with your photos library and your old ticket confirmation emails and reconstruct as far back as you can remember. The diary becomes much more useful when it goes deep.

After that, the cadence settles. You log each new gig within a day or two of it happening, while the details are fresh. Banded suggests gigs near you if you’ve set a home city, so often the gig is already half-filled when you go to log it.

If you’d like a step-by-step on importing historic shows, we wrote one: How to log a gig you went to years ago.

Why this matters now

There’s something quietly affecting about looking back through a 10-year gig diary. It’s not just a list of nights out — it’s a map of who you were. The bands you saw when you were 19 say something different about you than the bands you saw at 32. The venues that closed since you went there. The friends who were with you that aren’t around any more.

Letterboxd works because watching films is a way of locating yourself in time. Banded works for the same reason. You only get to go to a few thousand gigs in a lifetime. Worth writing them down.