Is a gig diary the same as a concert journal?

Yes — the terms are used interchangeably. 'Gig' tends to be more common in the UK, Ireland and Australia; 'concert journal' is more common in North America. They describe the same idea: a personal record of every live show you've been to.

What should I record in my gig diary?

At minimum: artist, venue, city, and date. Most people also note the support acts, who they went with, a rating out of 5, and a short review. Photos, ticket stubs and setlists are common additions for people who go deep.

Can I log gigs I went to years ago?

Absolutely — that's half the point. Build up your full history as memory allows. Apps like Banded let you back-date entries so your diary reflects every show you've ever been to, not just the ones from when you started logging.

What is a gig diary?

A gig diary is a personal record of every live music event you’ve attended — the artist, the venue, the date, and usually how it made you feel. Some people keep them in a Moleskine, others in a spreadsheet, and increasingly people keep them in apps like Banded, which is built specifically for the purpose.

It’s the live-music equivalent of a film journal or a reading log. The data is mostly the same — what, where, when, how good — but the format is shaped by the medium. A film journal can include posters. A reading log can include cover scans. A gig diary tends to lean on dates, venues, support acts, ticket stubs, and rough mental snapshots of the night.

Why people keep one

Three reasons come up again and again:

Memory is unreliable. If you go to even four or five shows a year, after a decade you’ll have forgotten half of them. Names blur, dates run together, and “the time we saw that band at that pub” becomes the entire memory. A diary anchors them.

Patterns emerge. Looking back at a few years of logs reveals things you didn’t notice in the moment — which venues you keep returning to, which artists you’ve seen evolve across a decade, which years were thin and which were stacked.

Sharing. A diary is more compelling when other people can see it. Friends who also go to gigs will compare lists, find shared shows you’d both forgotten about, or ambush you with “wait, you saw them in 2014?”

What to record

There’s no canonical schema, but most well-kept gig diaries include the same core fields:

Artist — the headliner
Support acts — easy to forget, frequently the most interesting part
Venue — and city, if you travel
Date — exact if possible, approximate if it was twenty years ago
Tour name — useful for the diehards
Rating — out of 5 is the standard
Notes — anything that anchors the memory: who you went with, how the crowd was, what they opened with

You can go further: ticket price, the weather, the setlist, photos. Apps like Banded pull setlists from Setlist.fm and artist images from MusicBrainz / Apple Music automatically so you don’t have to type everything yourself.

The case for back-dating

The single best move when you start a gig diary is to back-date everything. Sit down with a beer one evening, open your photos library, your Gmail, your old ticket confirmations — and reconstruct as much of your history as you can remember.

This is awkward at first because the gaps are obvious. You’ll know you saw a band but not remember which year. Don’t sweat the precision — guess, log it, fix it later if a friend reminds you. The diary becomes more valuable the further back it goes.

In Banded, this is the first thing the onboarding flow nudges you to do. There’s a guide here: How to log a gig you went to years ago.

Notebook vs spreadsheet vs app

Notebook: feels nice, hard to search, easy to lose, doesn’t share. Best for people who like the ritual.
Spreadsheet: searchable, sortable, eternal — but ugly, and no one’s looking at it but you. Best for the obsessive cataloguer.
App: searchable + shareable + connects you to other people’s diaries. Best for most people. See the best apps to track concerts for a comparison of what’s out there.

Banded is a free iOS app purpose-built for this. You can log a gig in about 15 seconds, build up your back catalogue, follow friends, and get a year-in-review at the end of December.

A short history of show-tracking

Before the internet, the format was pretty consistent: a stack of ticket stubs in a shoebox, possibly arranged in a scrapbook if you were tidy. Some people kept tour t-shirts as a kind of analogue diary.

The first digital version most people remember was Setlist.fm (launched 2008), which is technically a setlist-tracker but works as a gig log by association. You’d add yourself to a setlist’s “I was there” list, and it kept a running tally.

Songkick’s “Trackings” followed a similar pattern, mostly focused on tracking upcoming shows for your favourite artists rather than logging past ones. It’s been wound down repeatedly over the years (see Songkick alternatives).

Banded was built specifically for the gig-diary use case rather than as an add-on to a discovery feature. The whole app is organised around your personal log — what you’ve seen, where you’ve been, who’s worth following — and the social and sharing layers are built on top of that.

Getting started

You don’t need an app to start. Open a Notes file. Type the last gig you went to. Type the one before that. Keep going until you forget. Then go further — find the ticket confirmations in your inbox. That’s your gig diary.

If you want it searchable, social, and visible on a profile that friends can follow, download Banded and the diary lives in your pocket.