Track Your Concerts with Concert Archives

Interview By Lauren Elizabeth Campbell, Editor-in-Chief

I go to a lot of concerts, so many, it is sometimes hard to remember which artists I've seen and in which venues I’ve danced. As years pass and my memories are flooded with new concert experiences, it gets increasingly more difficult. When I found out about Concert Archives, I was immediately hooked. The website (and now app!) allows concert-goers to input the concerts they've seen and track them all in one location, allowing users to revisit their concert memories. Concert Archives' founder Justin Thiele tells Rock & Roamer how Concert Archives came to be and how it is a useful tool for music lovers:

What motivated you to start Concert Archives?

It started out as nostalgia. This is in like 2013 and I was getting back into vinyl. I rediscovered my record collection which had mostly been boxed up since moving to Portland, Oregon in 2008. That got me reminiscing about all the concerts I had been to in the prior 15 years. And so down the rabbit hole I went, researching past concerts and eventually discovering a text file in my old computer backups called 'bands I have seen.txt' where I listed some of my earliest concerts. To make a long story short, that sparked my motivation to build Concert Archives as a place to keep track of all the concerts I went to, upload photos, etc. And hopefully get my friends to do the same so I could see their photos from the concerts we went to together.

Who is the typical Concert Archives user?

There is a big range of users. From people who have just started going to concerts, to people who have seen hundreds, or even thousands, of concerts over the last several decades. Of course they're all music lovers. For some, it’s a hobby where they spend hours documenting concerts from the past 50 years – finding old newspaper articles, ticket stubs, photos, and videos. Others just add in a concert every few months when they attend a new one.

Why should a concert-goer use Concert Archives?

If you love music and concerts, you know that visceral feeling of seeing a band play the songs you love. Concert Archives helps you capture that feeling, remember it, and connect with others who feel the same way. With that, the people that attended can all add their photos and videos to a concert. Write comments and reviews. We automatically add in setlists. Then you can see stats about how many times you saw a band, how many concerts you go to per year, etc. You can plan your upcoming concerts. All kinds of stuff. It's a home for your concert life and your concert friends!

Concert Archives has been around since 2013, but just launched its mobile app. How do you foresee the app helping grow Concert Archives?

Users have always been able to use the website on their phone but it was just this year that we launched the native iOS and Android apps. Being a small team, it’s hard to support multiple platforms in the beginning, so we focused on the website and making it as powerful and feature-complete as possible. After we released the social networking features (like following friends, news feeds, etc.) about 2 years ago, it felt like the right time to shift our focus to building the mobile apps, which was a really big undertaking.

The mobile apps help us reach more casual users. The website is super powerful but it can be kind of intimidating for some people to get started. The mobile apps have a slimmed down interface so it’s easier for new people to jump in.

Where will Concert Archives be by 2031?

Concert Archives is 8 years old, but this is still just the beginning. I've always planned for Concert Archives to be a long term thing that would be around for decades. That mindset comes through in how we expand the website and apps, how we grow the team, and how we fund everything.

Our core belief is that concerts are really special experiences that should be preserved and shared. And we want to deepen the connection that fans have to these experiences, to each other, to the bands, and to the venues. So we’ll be doing that in every way we can for the foreseeable future.

Visit concertarchives.org or download the Concert Archives app on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store to start tracking your concerts.