Concert stats for the shows you were actually at

Anyone who goes to a lot of live music eventually wants the numbers. Sometimes it's an argument with a mate about who's seen a band more times. Sometimes it's a quiet bit of curiosity at the end of a busy year. Either way, the questions tend to be the same:

• How many concerts have I been to? In total, and year by year.
• Which band have I seen the most? And when and where each of those shows was.
• Which venue do I go to most? Is it the big room in town, or the small place round the corner you keep going back to?
• What do I spend on tickets? Your average ticket price, and whether it's crept up over the years.
• What was I doing on this day years ago? The gig you'd completely forgotten until a date reminded you.

None of these are hard questions. They're just impossible to answer from memory once you're past a few dozen shows, and the evidence is usually scattered across old emails, bank statements and a camera roll full of blurry stage photos.

Streaming services are brilliant at telling you what you listened to. Your end of year summary knows the album you played on repeat in March. What it can't know is that you saw that band twice, once in a tiny basement and once on a festival main stage, or that the support act on a wet Tuesday became one of your favourites.

Live music stats need a different source: a record of the shows themselves. Who headlined, who supported, which venue, what date and what you paid. Plenty of the bands you see live, especially local acts and openers, barely register in your listening history at all. That's why a proper gig diary is the starting point for any meaningful concert history stats.

Here's how those concert stats map back to the questions above, and which ones need Pro.

"How many gigs have I been to?"

Your events grouped by year show every show you've logged, and the venue directory gives you a show count for every place you've been. Both are free.

"Which band have I seen most?"

The free artist directory shows how many times you've seen each act, along with when and where. Pro adds a top-seen artists view so the ranking is done for you.

"Which venue do I go to most?"

The venue directory lists show and artist counts for every venue, free.

"What do I spend on tickets?"

You can log a ticket price with every concert and festival in the free app. Your average ticket price, worked out from those entries, is part of Personal Concert Analytics in Pro.

"What was I doing on this day?"

On This Day throwbacks live in the Nostalgia Feed, which is part of Pro.

Festivals belong in your history too. StubStash logs multi-day festivals with daily headliners, undercards and ticket prices, so your summers in fields sit alongside your regular gigs.

Every count in StubStash comes from what you've logged, so a gig that isn't in the app doesn't exist as far as your stats are concerned. It's worth an evening backfilling the shows you went to before you started, especially if you want an honest answer to how many concerts you've been to.

You don't need to do it all at once. Add the big ones first, then fill in the gaps as you find old tickets and photos. Our guide on how to remember every concert walks through where to look for the evidence and how to piece together years of gig-going.

Once your history is in, keeping it up to date is quick: log each new gig on the way home and the directories update as you go. If you're still weighing up how to track your shows, see what the StubStash concert tracker app does overall, or head back to the StubStash homepage.