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Sign-in records expire after a year, and the site has an imprint

The record of each sign-in is deleted after 12 months, and the privacy policy says how long everything else is kept.

Every time you sign in, the site notes the IP address, the email address and the time. A nightly job deletes those notes after 12 months, takes the IP address off a change to your email settings after the same time, and deletes messages to support after 24 months.

The privacy policy has four new sections: who runs the site, how long each kind of record is kept (server logs are 60 days), how data reaches services outside the EU, and your rights, including where to complain. Who runs the site is also on a page of its own, the imprint, linked from the foot of every page.

How long we keep it

Artist pictures, with the photographer's name under them

The picture at the top of an artist or concert page now comes from Wikimedia Commons, and the line under it says who took it and under which license.

The picture at the top of an artist page is now a photo from Wikimedia Commons, found through the artist's entry in MusicBrainz and Wikidata, and only when its license lets anyone reuse it. Under it you'll now find a line like "Photo: name, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons", with links to the photographer, the license and the original file. The same line is on the concert page, and in small print on the concert's memory card, because the card carries the picture too.

An artist with no freely licensed photo shows the plain stand-in for now. If you took a good one of a band you love, uploading it to Wikimedia Commons under a free license and adding it to the band's Wikidata entry is how it can end up here.

Browse the artists

Every review and photo can be reported

Somebody else's review, reply or photo now has a small "report" beside it. It opens the report panel with the item already named.

Until now the only way to tell us a review or a photo shouldn't be on the site was to write to support and describe where it was. Every review, reply and room write-up by somebody else now carries a small report at the end of its line, and every gallery has Report a photo under it. Either one opens the report panel from the footer, with "A review or photo shouldn't be here" picked and the item and the page already in the subject. Say which one and why; if it's your photo or your words, say that too. The panel and the support page both take the same kind of report, signed in or not.

Two smaller things. New members confirm they're 15 or older when they sign up, and the privacy policy says so. The maps now credit OpenStreetMap's contributors and CARTO with a link to each, as both ask.

Open support

An empty journal asks one question

A new journal used to open on two paragraphs and five buttons. It now asks who you last saw live, with the band field ready for the answer.

A new journal used to open on a choice: quick add, setlist.fm, the add-a-concert form, the archive, an example journal, all as buttons of equal weight, with the one tool that needs no date sitting under all of them. Now "Start here" is one question, "Who did you last see live?", and the band field under it. Type a name, and every night that band played comes back for you to press I was there on. On a computer the cursor is already in the field. The other ways in are still there, as one line of links under it.

Open your journal

Every country in the archive has concerts to show

Picking a country nobody has logged a night in used to say "Nothing in the record". It now lists every concert there.

The country in the path above a concert, venue, festival or city page takes you to the archive for that country. It showed only nights members had logged, and for 129 countries - Costa Rica, Malta, Albania among them - that was none at all. Those countries now list all their concerts, with the count at the top ("487 concerts in Albania"), and the year, decade and order filters still work on them. A country with logged nights keeps showing those, and now says so under the count: Argentina lists its 18 logged nights while Buenos Aires alone has thousands of concerts, and the line explains that the rest are on the city and venue pages. Narrowing to a city does the same.

Open the archive

Concert, festival and venue pages open the way artist pages do

The top of a concert, festival or venue page now matches the artist page: the name and the buttons on the left, the picture large on the right - or, for a venue, the room's details.

The four kinds of page used to start with a boxed ticket and a small framed picture. A concert page now shows the act's photo at half the width, a festival its poster, and a venue its address, capacity and first, last and next night logged, with the name, the date and Rate & review on the left. The figures - concerts, reviews, photos, and a score with how many people gave it ("96.7% from 41 ratings") - are one line under the name, beside the picture rather than in a row of their own below it, and the sentence above them no longer repeats them. Each one takes you to the part of the page it counts, and a figure that would say 0 is left out. On a phone the picture follows the buttons, so the first thing you can press is still near the top.

A night among the hundred best rated now says so above the act's name ("Top 1"), where the ticket's stub used to carry it.

City guides open the same way, without the right-hand column: the city, the years on record and its busiest decade, the figures as links, and Log a concert here.

Open the archive

A way to write one, from the reviews page

The reviews page now asks, above the index, whether you were at a night nobody has written up yet, and takes you to the archive to find it.

Until now the reviews page only offered to help you write a review once a filter had narrowed the list down to nothing. The invitation now sits at the top of the index, where everybody sees it: find the night in the archive and be the first to describe it. If you are not signed in, you can still rate and review a past concert without an account.

Open the reviews

A 2026 view on the charts, and your own place

A new 2026 filter sits beside All time and Last 12 months, and Top concertgoers shows where you rank even when you are not in the top eight.

The period switch on the charts page now offers All time, 2026 and Last 12 months. If you are signed in and not among the top concertgoers for the period you picked, your own line appears under the chart with your rank, so you can see how far off you are. If you have nothing logged for that period yet, the chart asks where you would rank and links to your journal.

Open the charts

Discover shows which friends are going

Members now see on discover how many of their friends are going to a date, and the save button says what it does.

On discover, when people you have been to a show with have the same date in their journal, the row now says so: "2 friends going". The save button reads "+ Bucket list" and turns into "On your list" once the date is saved.

Open discover

Archive scores say how many people gave them

A rated night in the archive now reads "80% from 3 ratings" instead of a bare 80%.

The score on an archive row used to be a percentage on its own, with its meaning hidden in a tooltip. It now says how many ratings it is the average of, so one person's 100% no longer looks the same as twenty people's.

Browse rated nights

The front page fits on a laptop screen

On a 1280 by 900 screen the guess box and the Start your journal button now sit above the fold, under a headline that runs three even lines.

The headline used to break over six lines on a laptop, with "to" alone on one of them, and pushed the guess and the button out of sight. It is smaller now, the text beside it uses the whole column, and the gaps are tighter.

The button under the sample ticket also keeps saying "Keep this stub - register free" while you fill it in. It used to shrink to a bare "Register free" until all three fields were done.

See the front page

A bigger picture of the act, and your place among its fans

The top of an artist page lets the act's photo take half the width, and Biggest fans now shows where you stand even when you are not in the top ten.

The artist used to sit in a small framed thumbnail. Now the name, the rank and the Follow button lead on the left and the photo takes the right; on a phone the photo comes after the buttons, so Follow is still the first thing you can press.

Under Biggest fans, a member outside the top ten gets their own row with their place, their nights and the year they first saw the act. Members who share a count share a place. If you have not logged a night with them yet, the list tells you where to find one.

Browse the artists

A festival line-up, one day at a time, with a tick for every set you saw

The line-up on a festival page now has a tab for each day, and on a day that has happened every act has a + you tap to say you saw that set.

On a festival of several days, the line-up opens on today if the festival is on, otherwise on its first day with acts, and the other days are one tap away instead of a long scroll down.

Every act on a day that has already happened has a + beside it. Tap it and that set goes into your journal, exactly as "I was there" does on the concert page, and each day tells you how many sets you have ticked. Tap it again to take the set out. Days still to come have no ticks, because nobody has seen those sets yet.

Your festivals

Rate a concert with one tap, and a line-up that knows who headlined

If you are not signed in, you can give a past night its score with one tap, and the line-up says who headlined only where we actually know.

If you are not signed in, you can now give a night its score with one tap, right on the page. The number you pick opens the review form with that score already chosen, and you still do not need an account. If you are signed in, "I was there" is the main button at the top, since that is the thing you came to do.

The line-up used to call every act a headliner, because that is how the concerts arrived from our listings source: on Glastonbury 2016 all 214 acts were "Headliner". Now the label only appears on a night or festival day that really tells headliners and support apart.

Open a night from the archive

Rewind: every year you logged, looked back on

Each year in your journal has a page of its own now - the days, the concerts, the artists, who and where you went back to most, what you made of it on average, and anything you finally ticked off the bucket list. With a card to share. This year's opens on 1 December.

Open Rewind in your journal and there is a tile for every year you have a concert in, back to the first one you ever put in. Each opens on the year told back to you: how many days you spent at a show, how many concerts that was, how many different artists; the acts, rooms and towns you went back to most, counted in nights so a nine-band festival Saturday is one trip to the grounds; your average score for the year and what it comes to in words; and the acts from your bucket list you saw for the first time that year, with the score you gave that night.

A year is filed under when the concert happened, not when you logged it, so an evening spent putting in 2009 gives you a 2009. Every past year stays open for good - this is not a page that disappears in January. The year in progress opens on 1 December and keeps counting until the 31st. Each one comes with a card in the passport's style, as a post or a story, to download or share straight from your phone.

Open your Rewind

The boxes that finish your typing put the answer first

Type "lju" into a city field and Ljubljana is at the top of the list instead of eleven rows below Herrljunga. Countries the same. And the one on your profile answers in a fortieth of the time it used to take.

The boxes that suggest a town or a country - two of them on add a concert, and your own city on your profile - offered whatever matched anywhere in the name, sorted alphabetically. So "lju" found Ljubljana and also Herrljunga, and put Herrljunga first. What starts with the letters you typed now comes before what merely contains them, which is what you meant every time: "us" gives you US before Belarus, "york" gives you York before New York, and both are still in the list.

The city box on your profile was also asking the database once for the list and then once more for every single city in it, to fetch the country name. Typing "an" meant 4,586 cities and about a third of a second of that, on every keystroke. It is one question now, fifty answers, about 26 milliseconds. Nothing you do with these boxes has changed; they are just quicker to agree with you.

Add a show

Naming who you were with, one after another

The box for the people beside you stays open and empties itself after each name, so the second and the third take a keystroke rather than three clicks. And it suggests the names you have actually typed before, which is new, whatever it looked like.

Nobody goes to a gig with exactly one person. Adding somebody used to close the whole box, leave their name sitting in it, and leave the button that opened it saying "Close" - so the next name meant pressing that, finding the old one still there, clearing it and starting again. The box stays where it is now, empty, with the cursor in it, and the list underneath says who is on the night.

The suggestions under that field were broken in a way that looked like a feature: whatever you typed, they offered every name you had ever written on any night, in alphabetical order. They were being sent your letters under a name the field stopped using months ago, so the search they ran was for nothing at all. They match what you type now. Two smaller things while we were in there: an empty name is refused instead of quietly put on the night as a person with no name, and a name already on that night says so rather than looking like nothing happened.

See who you went with

The genre tags lead somewhere

Press a tag under a band, or on a concert page, and you get every night on record by artists carrying it. On a show that has not happened yet the same tag shows you what else of that kind is coming up near you.

The tags come from MusicBrainz and they have been sitting there as plain text: you could read "post-punk" on a band's page and there was nothing to do with it. They are links now. From an artist, or from a night that has already happened, a tag opens the archive filtered to it - the filter was always in the archive, it just had nothing pointing at it.

From a concert that has not happened yet, the same tag goes to discover instead, because looking back through twenty years of post-punk is not what you want while holding a ticket for next month. That page now takes any tag at all, not only the ten on its own chip row, and it shows you which one is on so you can press it off again.

Pick a kind of night

One review per festival, added to over the years

Writing about a festival again does not start over. It adds a dated part, so your entry becomes a timeline of the festival across the years you have actually been - and it reads the same way from any year's page.

Rating an edition tells you about one weekend: the lineup, the atmosphere, whether it was run well, whether it was worth the ticket. It does not tell you what the festival has actually become across the years you have stood in that field - and that is the question you would answer for a friend deciding whether to buy next year's ticket.

So a festival review is one entry per person, made of dated parts, the same shape a room's review already had:

Jun 2023 One of the best weekends I have had. Great lineup, well organized.
Sep 2026 They changed the whole concept this year and it fell apart. Would not go back.

Writing again on the same day just edits that day. Coming back next year starts a new part, and older parts stay as they were - and because the entry belongs to the festival rather than to one weekend of it, it prints the same way on every edition's page: the 2023 page and the 2026 page both show the whole timeline. You need a year of the festival in your memories to write the first line; the box is under Rate this festival on any edition's page, and a fresh entry now shows up in the "last 24 hours" list on the front page and the archive too.

Find a festival you have been to

The house rules have a page, and the sign-up form is a form again

The rules for writing about shows used to be squeezed into a scrolling box under the password fields. They have their own page now, and registering is four fields and two ticks.

Nineteen provisions in a box the height of five lines, under the password fields, with a checkbox beneath - that is what the registration form asked a new member to read. Nobody did, and the box made a one-minute sign-up look like a contract.

The rules have a page of their own now, /house-rules, laid out like the privacy and cookie policies and linked from the foot of every page. The form keeps the checkbox and links to the page; the rules themselves are unchanged, word for word. Most of them still come down to one thing: argue about the gig, not about the person you are arguing with.

Anyone who kept the old address, /terms-of-service, lands on the new page.

Read the house rules

Bring your setlist.fm concerts over in one go

If you already keep your concerts on setlist.fm, type your username there into your journal and every night marked as attended comes across - nobody should have to type their history in twice.

Plenty of people have been keeping a list of the concerts they went to for years - just not here. setlist.fm is the usual place, and it is public: every account there has a list of the setlists its owner marked as attended. So the journal now asks for your setlist.fm username, fetches that list, and lays it out against the archive: which nights are on record here and just need adding to your journal, which are in your journal already, and which the archive does not have yet.

Tick what you want and press once. Nights the archive did not have are created from what setlist.fm knows - the act, the room, the town, the date, the setlist - and go into your journal like any other. If the act is new to the archive too, it is added with its MusicBrainz id, so its page fills itself in from there.

Your setlist.fm username is used for that one request and is not kept on your account; you can run it again whenever you have added more over there, and it skips what is already here. The privacy policy has the detail.

Bring your list over

Faster on a phone

A phone now gets its first look at a page one and a half seconds sooner, and the setlist is printed on the concert page instead of fetched after it.

Nothing you can do here has changed today. How fast it arrives has. Google's own page tester, run against the live site before and after, puts the first paint of a concert page on a mid-range phone 1.5 seconds earlier than it was yesterday morning, and an artist or venue page 1.3 seconds earlier. On a good connection you will not notice. On a train you will.

What changed, in order of how much it mattered: the typefaces are served from here rather than fetched from Google on every visit, and trimmed to less than half the bytes they were; the map library is served from here too, instead of from a third party the page had to wait for; the stylesheet and the site's own script go out without the comments and indentation that only matter to whoever edits them; the photo gallery's drawing code is fetched when you scroll toward the photos, not before the page has drawn; and a member's picture comes in two sizes now, so a review no longer downloads a full-size upload to fill a 40-pixel circle.

The setlist is part of the page. It used to be asked for from setlist.fm every time anybody opened a concert, which meant a "looking for the setlist" line for a second or two and nothing at all for anyone reading without scripts. Every setlist is now kept here once it has been found, and printed with the rest of the page. The ones nobody has opened yet are being fetched overnight.

Smaller things from the same pass: a link to a page that does not exist answers "not found" on the spot instead of bouncing through two redirects, and sharing a link to a page with no picture of its own shows a proper card rather than the 2013 logotype.

Two front doors that were missing are back

Every artist and every city has an index again.

Two indexes are back.

• Every artist, A to Z, with the most-logged acts up top
• Every city guide, by country

The redesign had dropped both, which left the archive's ten million concerts reachable through a search box and not much else. Every concert, artist, venue, festival and city page also carries a breadcrumb trail now, so you can step up from a night to its room, its town and its country.

Every artist, A to Z City guide

The same order on every page

Concert, artist, venue and festival pages now run in one order: what you can add first, then what people have written, then the place - laid out the same way wherever there is one.

The four big pages grew one section at a time over ten years, and each had its own idea of what came first. A concert page opened with the venue's upcoming dates; a festival page put its map full-width across the middle; the artist page kept its photos above the reviews. Reading three of them in a row meant learning three layouts.

They now share one order. First the things you can do: rate the night, share your memory, draw your card. Then the record: reviews, the tour, the setlist, the photos. Then the place: the room and how to get there, and somewhere to sleep it off. The section numbers down the side of every page and the jump list at the top follow the same sequence, so the third section of any page is the third thing in its list.

The place itself looks the same on a concert, a venue and a festival now: the map, a card of facts beside it (address, capacity, coordinates), and the accommodation search under both. A festival page also has a countdown to the next edition where it used to have a "save the date" line in the header.

One section went. A concert page no longer lists other concerts coming up at the same venue; that list belongs to the venue page, which is one click away in the new breadcrumb, and it was the section people scrolled past to reach the reviews.

Pick a night and see

A fourth card: the room

A venue page can now draw a card too - your verdict on the room, or the crowd's if you have not given one - in the same two shapes as the other three.

There were three memory cards: one for a night, one for a weekend, and the passport for your whole journal. A room was the one thing you could rate and not carry away. Now you can.

The venue card names the room and the town, stamps "I've been here" if the archive has you in it, counts the concerts logged there, and prints one score: your verdict on the place if you have answered the room questions, the crowd's if you have not. It is that first either/or answer, great or a mess, never an average of the five, for the same reason the page itself does not average them.

It comes in the same post and story shapes as the other cards, 1080 pixels wide, and you do not have to have rated the room to draw one - a stranger gets the crowd's figure. Unlike a concert card, which keeps the first version you drew, a room card can be drawn again when your verdict changes, because a verdict on a room is allowed to change: that is what the dated history on the venue page is for.

It sits on every venue page that has had at least one concert, under "Share your room verdict".

Find a room you have been in

Three cards, two shapes, and one for your whole journal

Every memory card now comes in a post shape and a story shape, and there is a new one that puts your entire concert history on a single ticket.

A memory card is the picture you get to keep after a night out - a ticket stub with the act, the room and the date on it, drawn from what you logged. There are three kinds now.

• A concert card, for one night. It names the act, the tour, the room and the festival if there was one.
• A festival card, for one weekend, with the bill and how many acts you caught.
• A passport, which is new, and is about you rather than about one night: every concert you have logged, the days you spent at a show, the countries, the cities, the act you have seen most, and where that puts you among everybody else keeping score here.

All three now draw in two shapes - a square-ish 4:5 for a post, and a tall 9:16 for a story - and you pick the one you want before you download. Either way the file comes out 1080 pixels wide.

The cards themselves were redrawn. The perforation down the side is cut out of the card now instead of being a dashed line pretending to be one, the paper has a real grain to it, and the printed code along the bottom is derived from the card itself, so no two cards carry the same one.

Your concert cards are on the concert pages, festival cards on the festival pages, and your passport is on your journal.

See the cards

Four questions about the weekend, five about the room

You could always say how a night was. Now you can say what the festival was like, and what the venue is like - which is a different question, and the one people actually search for.

Rating a concert tells you about one evening. It does not tell you whether the sound at that club is any good, or whether the festival is worth the ticket - and those are the things somebody wants to know before they buy.

So both now have questions of their own. They are deliberately either/or, because nobody can tell you the difference between 60% and 80% sound and everybody knows whether they could hear it.

A festival edition gets four: the lineup, the atmosphere, the organization, and the ticket price. Only the price has a "didn't pay" escape, because somebody on a guest list cannot judge value and should not have to guess. It is asked per edition, not per festival, which is what makes the fourth section on a festival page possible: how the same weekend has held up year on year, so you can see the organization score fall the year they moved site.

A venue is asked first whether the place itself is any good - great, or a mess - and then four that break it down: the sound, the sightlines, getting in and out, and the bar prices. You can also say whether you were on the floor, in the balcony or seated, because "obstructed view" from the back of a flat floor and from a balcony are different complaints.

The room's score is that first answer on its own, not an average of the five, and the difference is not small. Take a club with great sound, clear sightlines, quick doors and a ripoff bar: average those four and it comes out at 75% - "solid" - about a room its own regulars would only walk into for a band they cannot see anywhere else. Asked directly, the same room reads "avoid", with the sound marked great underneath. That is what somebody actually tells a friend, and the four are the breakdown rather than the verdict.

The venue answer is one per person, not one per visit. Somebody who has been to the same club forty times gets one vote, or the regulars decide what the room is like for everybody else. Changing your answer replaces it, and the page shows the recent years separately from the lifetime figure, so a new PA or a refit shows up instead of being averaged away by a decade of the old room.

Find a room you have been in

One review per room, added to over the years

Writing about a venue again does not overwrite what you wrote last time. It adds a dated part, so your entry becomes a timeline of the room.

A venue page where one local has forty entries is useless to somebody who came to find out about the room. But one review you can edit is worse, because editing destroys the thing that is actually worth reading.

"The sound was awful until the 2019 refit, it is a great room now" is exactly what a reader is there for, and you only get it if both halves survive.

So a venue review is one entry per person, made of dated parts, and writing again adds to it rather than replacing it:

Mar 2016 Sound is muddy anywhere behind the desk.
Nov 2024 Back after the refit. Night and day.

Writing again on the same day just edits that day. Coming back next year starts a new part, and older parts stay as they were - the timeline is the content.

This is separate from writing about a gig. What you thought of the night still belongs on the concert page; this is about the building.

Write about a room